


Bluejay

by tfm



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-25
Updated: 2012-07-05
Packaged: 2017-10-20 17:08:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 32,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/215073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tfm/pseuds/tfm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been two years since Jennifer Jareau has seen her team. She's been a little busy fighting demons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [floatingamoeba](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=floatingamoeba).



For a full moon night, the bar was relatively packed.

Usually, the mercs were out in force, hunting down any rogue werewolf that strayed from the designated "welfare zones" as they were called. Parks and Wildlife Services paid fifty bucks for any dead 'wolves brought in overnight, in order to encourage "safe shapeshifting." At least that's what the pamphlets said.

At best, the system was corrupt. At worse, it was genocide.

Jennifer Jareau didn't have any excessive sympathy towards werewolves – especially the ones that strayed out of the welfare zones – but she wasn't going to commit murder for a quick buck, either.

Shaking the rain out of her hair, JJ stepped inside the bar.

The security guy at the door eyed her gun belt – two nine millimeters in holsters, and only the bare minimum of what she carried. Out here, in the middle of nowhere, you could barely go half a mile without running into another creature that would sooner rip out your heart than let you pass unscathed.

Security guy nodded her through.

JJ would bet her life on the fact that he had measures in place to ensure that the place remained violence free. Some people she'd met carried demon tails – highly illegal, black market artifacts that allowed the user brief bursts of magic, without selling your soul. Not particularly powerful, but a lot more agreeable than selling your soul, or getting your throat torn out.

Nobody gave her a second glance as she stepped up to the bar. The truth of it was, things were so bad, these days, that seeing someone in a leather duster and packing enough heat to take down a SWAT team single-handedly was pretty much second nature.

'Jack and coke,' she told the bartender, a grizzled guy in his fifties that looked as though he'd lost a fight with a tiger. Any other night, she would have said werewolf, but there was no way he could have prevented the change without some serious mojo – the kind of mojo that would have been picked up by the device clipped to her belt. At present, it buzzed lightly, which was to be expected in a place like this – a residual curse on a guy that had pissed off the wrong demon, or maybe vampire blood that hadn't quite washed out of someone's socks.

'Keep the change.' JJ slid over a twenty, and took her drink. It didn't take long to find the people she was looking for.

Emily Prentiss and Derek Morgan were huddled in a corner booth, engaged in what looked like a serious conversation. Morgan looked up as she approached, and his expression shifted from somber to joyous. The device on her hip buzzed a little harder. 'JJ.'

He stood, and wrapped her in a bear hug. It had been a long time since Jennifer Jareau had been held – by anyone.

Morgan sat back down, and JJ hesitated briefly before following suit. It wasn't that she didn't trust her former colleagues, but when push came to shove, she didn't feel all that comfortable sitting with her back to the rest of the bar.

It had only been two years, but JJ could tell from their expressions alone, that things had changed dramatically. Emily's hand was underneath the table, presumably holding some kind of weapon, and her eyes kept darting about the room. She still hadn't said a word to JJ. Morgan's face and neck were both heavily scarred, and his spine rod-straight.

It must have been Hotch that had picked this place to meet, because it was abundantly clear that neither Emily nor Morgan were even a little bit comfortable.

'I heard about what happened,' Emily said, as though she'd jerked out of a trance and only just realized that JJ was even there. 'I'm sorry.'

'Thanks,' JJ said shortly, even though she wasn't really thankful at all. After everything that _had_ happened, it was hard to be thankful for anything. 'Where's Rossi?' she asked them, eager to change the subject. 'I thought he was travelling with you.'

Emily and Morgan shared a significant look. Unlike them, JJ had never been a profiler, but she didn't miss the guilt that passed between them.

'We had a demon possession incident last month,' Emily admitted. 'He's in a hospital in Denver.'

JJ frowned. 'Possession doesn't usually leave a physical mark.' Emily closed her eyes and bit her lip.

'He wasn't the one who got possessed,' Morgan elaborated. 'He was just the one that got thrown off a four-story balcony.'

Emily shot him a look. 'Derek.'

'What? We spoke about this, remember. No lies.'

'I get that,' Emily said, through gritted teeth. 'But could you please _not_ tell her in a bar full of demon hunters?' She shook her head, and Morgan frowned.

'Denver isn't particularly demon-friendly, so we had to get the hell out of dodge before someone realized what happened,' he continued.

'So he's there alone?'

'Garcia's with him,' Emily explained, refusing to meet JJ's gaze. 'Last we heard, he was on crutches.'

'Oh,' was all JJ said. It was all she really _could_ say. 'Do you know why Hotch called us in?'

They didn't, as it turned out – like JJ, they'd gotten the middle of the night phone call that had only given a date, time and location, along with the codeword they'd come up with to use in emergencies – Bluejay.

A waitress came to the table with a plate of wings and side of fries that someone – Morgan, presumably – had ordered. JJ took a single fry, ignoring the small bowl of aioli – in her experience, most bars in this part of the country added extra garlic to their sauces these days in order to stave off vampire attacks, and that kind of bad breath wasn't something she wanted to deal with, on top of everything else.

It was an hour later before Hotch showed up. By that point, the rain had stopped, and most of the bar's patrons had left in hunt of werewolf pelts. No doubt most of them would kill actual wolves, instead of shapeshifters, either in the hopes that the Rangers wouldn't be able to tell the difference, or flat out ignorance.

She almost didn't recognize him at first – once upon a time, Aaron Hotchner was the man that had slept in starched suits. The man that stepped up to the bar was ragged; hair untrimmed, clothes unwashed, and an eyepatch on his left eye. The only reason she could tell it was him was the way he held himself – above all else, Aaron Hotchner would always be the man that carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. A modern day Atlas.

Now, he kind of looked like Snake Plissken.

His companions were conspicuous in their absence; it was Morgan that finally asked. 'Where're Reid and Seaver?'

'Seaver's dead,' he said bluntly, in a voice that was Aaron Hotchner's, only so much darker. 'Reid's…gone.'

There was a long silence, and JJ didn't miss the expression of both grief and horror that crossed both Emily and Derek's faces.

'What do you mean, "gone?"' Emily asked, eventually.

'Gone as in "missing,"' Hotch explained. 'Abducted by demons, I don't know.' More than anything, the sheer despair in Hotch's voice struck JJ to the core. This was the man that had been a pillar of strength within the BAU. This was the man that had kept them all sane during their years of tracking down serial killers. To see him so desolate was a stark reminder of the state of the world.

'What happened?' Morgan pressed.

'We were cutting through Montana,' Hotch started, and already, JJ could see where the story was going. Montana was one of the more infested places in the country. While that meant there were more mercs roaming around, it was still probably the most dangerous places to be. 'Locals were disappearing in one of the fortressed towns, and the security forces weren't doing anything about it, so we checked it out.'

'Turned out, a guy who fancied himself some sort of necromancer decided he would deal with the demon problem by performing human sacrifices. He's finishing up his incantations when we storm the place, and Seaver managed to take him down before he slit his victim's throat, but it was too late.'

There was a long pause. 'Demons don't like being summoned without getting their fill of blood.' They could have filled in the blanks from there, but Hotch was not the kind of person to leave out details just because they were a little messy. 'It snapped Seaver's neck, and took Reid. I don't know why it didn't kill either of us, or what it wanted with him.'

'Some demons just want to fuck with people,' Emily provided. 'But if someone was dealing in sacrifices, then chances are this demon wasn't some minor player.'

Hotch nodded. 'That's what I figured.' His expression shifted to a frown. 'Where's Rossi?'

'Denver,' Emily answered, not elaborating.

'We can pick him up on the way, if he's willing.'

They were in Texas, of all places, a fact which made JJ pause just a little – if this had all gone down in Montana, then why did Hotch bring them to Texas? It was a day's drive between them, at least. She didn't have a problem with the driving – it was all she seemed to do, some days – but it was kind of weird.

The realization hit JJ with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

He was _scared._

The actual answer had something to with the fact that Morgan and Emily had been nearby, but that didn't change the fact that a scared Hotch was about as common as friendly demon. Not unheard of, but not something you saw on every street corner.

'We shouldn't drive tonight,' Morgan said decidedly. 'I don't want to get capped in the ass because some drunk idiot thought we were a bunch of werewolves out for a spin in a Ford Escape.'

'There's a motel in town,' JJ added. 'We can spend the night and discuss our travel options in the morning.' It might have been easier for them to all travel in the one car, but JJ did not want to leave behind the comfort and safety of her own vehicle. And maybe there was a tiny part of her that didn't really want to be seen hunting demons in a Ford Escape.

Emily went to settle the bar tab that she and Morgan had rung up, as JJ brought up the issue of sleeping arrangements.

'I'll stay with Prentiss,' Morgan said, so quickly that JJ raised an eyebrow in surprise.

'It's not like that,' he amended – even more quickly. 'Just since the demon thing…she gets nightmares…They can be pretty violent.'

'Nightmares?' Hotch asked, frowning. He didn't question the "demon thing" which made JJ realize that the two groups had probably been in constant contact.

'I dunno,' Morgan shrugged. 'Visions, maybe. Some kind of residual aftereffect.' There was a long pause. 'Or maybe they're just bad dreams.'

Nightmares weren't uncommon, even before the world had (literally) gone to hell. The fact that they were dealing with actual monsters, rather than serial killers only meant that the subject matter had changed a little.

The motel room was small, and sparsely furnished – two beds, and a single table and chair. It could afford to be – so many people lived nomadic lives these days that any form of overnight accommodation was in high demand, and motel owners could charge through the nose for it, which they did. It certainly would have been cheaper to sleep in the car, but a motel room had one luxury the car didn't – a shower.

Between the four of them, they had three vehicles, and only two allocated parking spaces. Once they got on the road, any more than two cars would be a hindrance. With little hesitation, Hotch had taken his car down to the garage, and returned with a wad of cash – decent cars were another thing in high demand. When you drove cross-country killing monsters, it was important to have a vehicle that functioned like clockwork.

In any case, the cash would be even more useful, since a good credit rating was a thing of the past – at least out in demon country.

JJ watched as Hotch set his go-bag on the end of the bed, and pulled out a worn travel case.

'You need a haircut,' JJ said abruptly, half startling herself. She would never have said something like that to Hotch three years ago, and they both knew it. He stared at her.

'Are you offering?' The tone of his voice was almost amused – the stealth humor that the Aaron Hotchner of old was famous for.

But he didn't smile.

She didn't cut his hair, if only because the only cutting implement she had was the six-inch hunting knife sheathed in her boot, and that wouldn't give a very good haircut. Judging by the fact that Morgan's hair (or rather, lack thereof) looked like it had some kind of regular maintenance, he probably had some kind variety of electric clippers.

Hotch made his way to the bathroom wordlessly and JJ found herself staring at the motel room door. The simple lock and chain wasn't nearly enough security, so she grabbed a chair and wedged it under the door handle. If someone _really_ wanted to get in, it wouldn't stop them, but at the very least it would provide some warning.

JJ usually showered in the mornings – that, at least, was one thing that had carried over from her normal, everyday life. Back then, it had been breakfast, coffee, shower, kiss Will and Henry goodbye. Now, the order was a little different, and some steps were missing altogether.

She changed into sweatpants and a t-shirt – comfortable enough to sleep in, but more importantly, if the shit hit the fan, she wouldn't be fleeing the motel in panties and a singlet.

Sleep came quickly, but it was not a deep sleep. Deep sleep was for fortified cities, and the days of yore, when there wasn't the chance of a werewolf, or a vampire, or a demon bursting through at any moment.

Of course, deep sleep brought its own issues.

The depths of darkness that the real world couldn't even begin to show.

…

Emily stood in front of the bathroom mirror, staring. Usually, possession _didn't_ leave a physical mark. But that didn't account for the scars that came from a knife, or a bullet.

It was only one shot, but it had been well-placed – enough to incapacitate her while Morgan exorcised the demon. The memory of the events was burnt into her mind, and no amount of demon killing or vampire slaying would change that fact.

Morgan knocked on the door. 'You almost done?'

'Yeah,' she called back, wrestling her shirt on. The scar at her shoulder itched and burned, but that seemed psychosomatic more than anything. Whatever had happened to her was nothing compared to what JJ had gone through.

Without pulling the covers back, she lay down on the bed closest to the door, and stared at the ceiling.

'When did everything get so fucked up?' she asked Morgan, when he came out of the bathroom. He didn't answer straight away, but she the bed sink down at the end.

'Things have always been fucked up,' he answered grimly. 'That's how we know we're still alive.'

'Just got to roll with the punches, huh?'

'Something like that,' Morgan said. Neither of them spoke again for a long time.

Outside, a wolf howled.


	2. Chapter 2

It was dark – that was Derek Morgan’s first thought when he opened his eyes. Not as dark as it should have been – that was his second thought. Most motels in the middle of demon country turned off their electricity past midnight, and this one was no exception. The light flickered, casting dark shadows against the wall.

He turned, to see Emily reading by candlelight.

‘Everything okay?’ he asked, pulling himself to a seated position. She started, glancing briefly at the page number before snapping the book closed.

‘Sorry,’ she said, voice distant. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’

The book was an old, leather-bound thing that she had picked up at a second-hand bookstore in Tulsa, marked down considerably thanks to the blood that stained its pages. Someone had been trying to use Lovecraft as a “how to summon demons” guidebook. Apparently, it didn’t end well.

‘That thing’ll give you nightmares,’ he joked.

‘I don’t need the book to give me nightmares,’ she said darkly.

Morgan’s eyes widened. ‘Again? Why didn’t you wake me?’

‘To be honest, Derek, there wasn’t exactly anything you could do about it. It was the same as it always has been – blood, fire, the end of the world. Nothing new.’ He relaxed slightly. Tonight, it seemed, had been a mild night, in comparison to some of the dreams she’d had. Or maybe she was just getting used to them. Neither option was particularly heartwarming.

His own dreams had been as forgettable as always. It wasn’t that they weren’t interesting, as much as it was that he didn’t put much stock in dreams as an omen of the future. Just as a reflection of his current mental state.

He didn’t need his subconscious to tell him how he was feeling.

…

JJ woke a little before dawn, to Hotch cleaning his weapons at the small wooden table. Having reliable, well-maintained weaponry was one of the most important parts of the job. It didn’t matter how vigilant, or how good of a tracker you were, if your gun jammed, then you were demon fodder.

‘Remington 1100,’ JJ observed, stretching her limbs. ‘Good choice.’

‘If you can hit what you’re aiming for,’ Hotch commented. JJ had seen the marksmanship awards on his office wall – Hotch could hit a pinpoint target at a hundred paces. Of course, there was a difference between shooting a target and shooting a demon.

Demons were vicious. They were fast. They were strong. They struck without mercy, and they did not pull their punches. JJ could attest to that much.

‘Tell me what happened,’ Hotch said softly. JJ didn’t answer. She closed her eyes, trying to ignore the tears that were fighting to escape.

She could still feel their blood on her hands.

‘I screwed up. They died,’ she said shortly. ‘End of story.’

In the middle of nowhere, Arizona, there were two graves, one big, one small. Her wounds still bleeding, she’d dug them until the chill of the desert air stung her bones. Only when the last shovelful of dirt had been pressed down, did she let the first tear fall.

The bodies of the demons, she had burned. Whatever they were, they didn’t deserve her respect.

She hadn’t cried since.

By the time she’d showered and dressed – khakis, button up shirt, duster and boots – Hotch had his own things packed. By the time she’d belted her holster and put her backup weapons in the appropriate places, he was at the door.

JJ slung her own bag over her shoulder, keeping the shotgun out. It wasn’t likely that there would be any kind of monster activity within the town, but it never paid to be too careful.

Morgan and Prentiss were already waiting by the cars, looking like they were a part of some post-apocalyptic clothing catalogue, both dressed in denim and leather.

‘We should get breakfast before we start out,’ Hotch suggested. ‘I want to get as much driving in as possible before nightfall.’ Even though the FBI had literally crumbled to the ground, they still deferred to his leadership. After all, he wasn’t made Unit Chief simply because he looked good in a suit (though she couldn’t deny that he did).

The diner was mostly empty – anyone that had gone hunting the previous night was most likely dead or asleep.

A Parks and Wildlife Services Ranger was sitting at the counter, almost falling asleep in his polystyrene coffee cup.

‘How many werewolves were tagged last night?’ JJ asked, curious.

‘One werewolf, nine actual wolves, three cattle, and an armadillo.’

‘An armadillo?’ Emily repeated incredulously.

‘Mmm,’ the Ranger nodded. ‘Guy insisted it was a were-armadillo. We chucked him in the drunk tank for the night.’

They put in their orders with the woman behind the counter, and made their way to a booth at the back of the diner. ‘At least they didn’t tag any humans,’ Morgan said lowly, sliding in beside Emily.

‘I know, but Christ – an _armadillo_?’ Emily said, exasperated. ‘Once upon a time, that would have at least warranted a fine. Now it’s just a night in the drunk tank?’

‘Everyone’s too busy worrying about the monsters to care that humanity’s going down the same path.’ Morgan’s voice was dark, as if the idea insulted him in some way. JJ didn’t doubt that fact. Of all the directions she’d expected her life to take, this was pretty far down on the list.

Breakfast came quickly – bacon, eggs, pancakes, toast. Carbs and protein, for all your demon-hunting needs.

‘And your fruit salad.’ The waitress set the small bowl down in front of JJ, to the amusement of both Morgan and Emily. She didn’t mind. In fact, anything that got them laughing these days was alright in her book.

Hotch gave the smallest of eyebrow quirks, but said nothing. There was nothing wrong with making sure she got her vitamins.

On the off chance she did survive this hellish nightmare, she didn’t want to die of something ridiculous, like scurvy.

After they had all finished eating, Morgan pulled out a map, and they planned their route to Denver. It was covered in crosses and circles, and shaded bits – the places you really didn’t want to go, and the places you did. One wrong turn could make you demon fodder.

Aaron Hotchner had learned that lesson the hard way.

‘So why _were_ you in Montana?’ Morgan asked, voicing the question that nobody had quite been willing to ask.

Hotch doesn’t answer straight away. When he does, it’s with a dark voice. ‘There were rumors – increased demon activity, people disappearing. Most people were willing to just sit there and let it happen. Something that big, and they think that it’s easier to fence off, rather than do something about it.’

‘So you checked it out,’ JJ finished. Hotch gave a short nod.

‘Something that big, you should have called us,’ Morgan argued. Emily gave him a nudge, shaking her head. The last thing they needed was an alpha male stand-off.

‘I made a judgment call,’ Hotch said, unapologetic. ‘If we went in straight away, there was a chance we could find the people that disappeared.’

‘And instead, Seaver’s dead, and Reid’s missing. Great judgment call.’

‘Enough,’ JJ said sharply. ‘You know damn well you would have done the exact same thing, given the circumstances.’

There was an awkward silence, and Morgan’s shoulders seemed to relax. He wasn’t going to push the point further, a fact for which JJ was grateful. Things were going to be hard enough without them being at each other’s throats. They needed to act like the professional, elite BAU team, even if really, they were only half a team right now.

By the time they were ready to go, it was just past eight-thirty. Providing optimal driving conditions (and the conditions rarely were optimal) it would take around fourteen hours to get to Denver.  Two days, if they kept to driving while the sun was up.

Reid could be wounded, or tortured. He could be dead.

They could be walking into a trap.

Of course, the way things were, it was just as dangerous without traps.

JJ went to the bathroom, and when she returned, she was surprised to find Emily in the passenger’s seat, rather than Hotch.

‘Morgan needed some “guy time,”’ Emily explained with a shrug, but JJ was still somewhat uncomfortable. Not that she didn’t like Emily – before the world had gone to hell, they’d been fairly close. It was just that she’d spent so much time with Morgan that it felt like there was some kind of in-joke that JJ wasn’t privy to. At least with Hotch, she could relate to his experiences.

They were more alike than she really wanted to admit to.

Emily didn’t talk much.

She read, mostly, scanning pages of a half a dozen books, looking, JJ assumed, for some kind of reference to what was going on. They had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. In less than a day, the entire country overwhelmed by all manner of dark creatures. In less than a week, it had spread across the rest of the world.

Nobody knew how.

Nobody knew why.

The creatures – demons and vampires and werewolves – were not inclined to talk. They killed, and they destroyed, and they turned good people into monsters, but they didn’t talk.

Still, JJ was curious, in a “I want to know what the creatures that killed my husband and son are doing here,” kind of way. ‘Anything?’ she asked. It was almost three p.m. and for the last hour, there had been just two cars on the road.

Emily didn’t answer straight away. ‘“A nameless, terrible thing,’ she whispered. ‘Soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.”’

‘You found a historical reference?’

‘No,’ Emily said. ‘It was nothing important. The problem…is that I can’t tell what’s myth and what’s not. We call them demons, but…who’s to say what they really are?’

JJ didn’t have an answer to that. They needed to be proactive, rather than reactive, but that didn’t make a damn difference if they didn’t know what they were really fighting, or how to stop it.

In front of them, Hotch and Morgan came to an abrupt stop. JJ hit the brakes quickly, heart suddenly thumping just that little bit faster.

They were in the middle of nowhere – why the hell were they stopping?

JJ undid her seatbelt, and pulled her shotgun from its holder on the car door. Beside her, Emily unzipped her duffel bag, and pulled out a semiautomatic rifle. JJ raised an eyebrow.

‘You know how to use that thing?’

‘Yep,’ Emily said, without any hint of elaboration. JJ didn’t argue. After all, her own set of skills had increased dramatically over the past two years. Demons didn’t respond well to the threat of press conferences.

They stepped out of the car.

‘What’s going on?’ JJ called out.

‘Over there.’ Morgan pointed to a tree in the distance. A body hung by the neck from one of the upper branches.

‘Might be a trap,’ JJ offered.

‘Might not be,’ Morgan countered. There was a long silence. ‘We can’t just perpetually walk on eggshells,’ he said. ‘Every damn thing that we do is going to be risky. Going to the freaking _bathroom_ is risky these days. If it’s a trap, it’s a trap. We’ve dealt with worse.’

JJ had the self-restraint not to hit him. After all, he didn’t know about the circumstances that had led to Will and Henry’s death.

Still. He wasn’t wrong. They couldn’t fight this if they kept running away.

‘Pan out,’ Hotch directed. He didn’t need to explain why; if there was anyone waiting to ambush them, then they’d have a harder job of it. Of course, it would also make it easier to take them each down separately.

 JJ took a long, curved path in order to flank from behind.

Still a hundred feet away, she stopped. There was a strange chill in the air. She knew that chill all too well.

The tree burst into flames.


	3. Chapter 3

The sky was on fire.

Part of that was the sun setting, a brilliant orange that stained the horizon. Part of it was the wall of flames that encircled them.

No escape this time.

JJ sweated beneath her duster, but this wasn’t the time to take it off. There were half a dozen demons, waiting to kill them, and she didn’t want to give anything that could be considered a display of weakness. In any case, the coat served some amount of protection.

They didn’t attack.

They stood there, looking ominous and intimidating, but they didn’t attack.

‘What do you want?’ Morgan demanded, leveling his own rifle at the demon closest to him.

One of the demons stepped forward. His eyes glowed red, and even though that was the only physical characteristic that painted him as someone possessed a demon, there was something about the way they held themselves that made it blindingly obvious. In their original form, the idea was markedly less subtle, but seeing a demon in its true form was a relatively rare occurrence.

A true demon, as it was told, was twelve feet tall, with scaled skin, and a long, horned tail. To kill one was not unheard of – after all, the demon tails came from somewhere. Jennifer Jareau had seen a grand total of two demons, one of which was now dead. It had taken a lot of bullets, and a burst of magic from the creature’s own tail to achieve that end.

Half a dozen of the demon-possessed seemed almost child’s play in comparison.

But still, they didn’t attack.

‘We’re looking for the one whom you call…Spencer Reid.’

‘You’re asking _us_?’ Morgan shot back. ‘You’re the ones that took him.’

‘Spencer Reid was not taken by my people. If we had taken him, we would not need to know where he was.’ The demon spoke with a tone that made it very clear he considered Derek Morgan an idiot.

‘We don’t know where he is,’ Hotch said sharply.

‘That is unfortunate. If you had known, then perhaps we could have found a reason to keep you alive.’

That, it seemed, was their cue to spring into action. JJ fired her shotgun, and then rolled to the side. The fireball crashed into the wall of flames with a _whoosh_. The effect probably would have been spectacular, if she was watching.

There was no time for being a tourist.

It was pretty much the worst defensive position possible – no cover, nowhere to run, and too high a chance of hitting one of her teammates. If nothing else, it was a well-crafted ambush.

She tried to block out the sounds of battle from around her. None of them were going to go down without a fight.

JJ fired the shotgun again, this time hitting a demon directly in the face. He snarled, but otherwise showed no sign of slowing down. The third time she fired, it was followed almost immediately by a wave of energy knocking her backwards, just short of the flames.

She couldn’t see the shotgun.

Any further, and she would have been burned alive. On the list of possible deaths by demon, it was one of the more horrifying ones that she could imagine. Before she could pull herself up, a demon had grabbed her by the throat, and lifted her from the ground.

 _Can’t_ …

The smoke, and the way her larynx was being crushed meant that breathing was next to impossible. She kicked out at her attacker, blows barely landing. She was being choked to death, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

 _Hotch…_

There was a bang and a blinding flash of white light, and JJ collapsed to her knees, sucking in what little air there was. Her throat burned, and her eyes burned, and her ears were ringing.

A hell of a way to end the day.

…

Hotch ran to JJ’s side. Her eyes were closed, and her cheeks were warm. He could feel her breathing still, but that didn’t mean she was alright.

‘Hotch…’ Morgan said, a tone of warning in his voice. ‘I thought you said that Seaver was dead.’

Hotch stood, eyes locking on to the woman that had saved them, her slight form silhouetting against the dying sun.

Dumbfounded wasn’t the right word, but it was close.

The flames were gone, and the demons were dead, and the woman who was standing in front of them could absolutely not have been there.

 _Three years ago you thought that demons were impossible_.

‘Ashley?’ Prentiss asked, hesitant. Her left arm hung beside her, limp, and her face was streaked with blood and dirt.

‘Guys, this is…awkward,’ Ashley said, clearly unnerved by the way they were staring at her. Hotch did not lower his gaze. ‘But trust me, it’ll all make sense. Kind of.’

The woman’s eyes flashed red, and Hotch swung his gun up so fast he was pressing against the trigger before his brain had even processed what was going on.

‘My name is Sekhmet – I share this form with your friend.’

‘You’re a demon,’ Morgan said aggressively.

Ashley – Sekhmet – stared at him, eyes of ice looking like they might pierce him. ‘Demon is your word,’ she said, without elaboration.

‘Sekhmet,’ Prentiss said with a frown. ‘Egyptian warrior goddess and the goddess of healing. Her breath was said to have created the desert.’ Morgan gave her a look. ‘What?’ Prentiss shrugged, wincing at the pull on her arm.

‘I am not the first Sekhmet,’ the demon revealed. ‘I am simply the current one.’ She stepped forward, and for some reason, Hotch knew that his gun would do no good. His grip loosened as she knelt down beside JJ and pressed a hand to her forehead. ‘She is strong,’ Sekhmet said. ‘Stronger than anyone will ever give her credit for, but that’s the way she likes it.’ Her hand pulsated white. ‘She can take care of herself physically, but emotionally…I don’t think that you should split up again.’

Sekhmet pressed something into his hand, before disappearing in a second flash of light.

JJ’s eyes opened, and she sat up quickly. Her breath came in fast gulps. Hotch knelt, putting his hand to her shoulder. ‘Hey,’ he whispered. ‘Hey, you’re okay.’

‘What happened?’ JJ asked, clutching at her throat. She frowned, as she realized who was standing over her. ‘What’s going on?’

‘We’re still trying to figure that out,’ he told her grimly. Satisfied that JJ was going to be okay, he looked down to see what Sekhmet had given him – six inches worth of demon tail.

‘Guys,’ Morgan said. Hotch turned. Morgan’s gun was pointed at one of the demons lying in the dirt. It was squirming. ‘One of them is still alive.’

…

Morgan ran to get some rope from the car, leaving Emily, Hotch and JJ to watch over the demon. It was badly injured, so he doubted that it was going anywhere, but they were better safe than sorry.

The rope was enchanted, for lack of a better term. It diluted the magic of whatever it touched – the demon bound by this rope wouldn’t be teleporting away, or casting fireballs, or anything like that. It went against his principles of not using anything magical, but sometimes, you didn’t have a choice.

Hotch held the thing down while Morgan tied its hands and its ankles. In another life, it had been male, but Morgan wasn’t going to prescribe gender. Gender was a human thing.

‘We can’t question it here,’ Morgan said. ‘We’re way too out in the open.’

‘So what, throw him in the trunk of the car, and stick a cattle prod into his chest once we’re fifty miles away?’ Emily asked, her face creased into a frown.

‘No torture,’ Hotch said evenly, in a voice that did not allow for any argument. Morgan wasn’t planning on arguing. As much as he hated these creatures, that was a line that he wouldn’t cross.

‘We’re not too far from the nearest safe zone,’ JJ said, pulling the map out of her duster. ‘There’ll be a demon-grade holding cell there.’

‘We’d better hurry then.’ Emily looked back at the sunset. It was almost dark. Didn’t matter how far they were from town, vampires and werewolves were a real threat.

So they bundled the unconscious demon up into the back of Morgan’s car. He noticed Emily wince, hand against her shoulder.

‘Hey – you okay?’

‘Think I might have strained it,’ she said, noncommittally, as if it didn’t really matter. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t, but he was worried anyway. If there was a safe zone nearby, then he’d make her go to a doctor. Things would be hard enough without bringing untended injuries into the mix. ‘I dreamed about this,’ she said, once JJ and Hotch were out of earshot.

Morgan stopped in his tracks. ‘What?’

‘Last night,’ she explained. ‘When I had a nightmare – it was like this. A tree in flames, and a group of demons…At first I thought I was going insane, but…’

‘Maybe it was just a coincidence,’ he suggested. ‘I mean, we deal with a lot of demons.’

‘Maybe,’ Emily echoed. She didn’t seem convinced. ‘What if I’m turning into one of them, Derek?’ she asked, fear in her voice.

Morgan didn’t have an answer.

…

The next safe zone was less than thirty miles away. It had probably been a quiet town, once upon a time. Somewhere where people came to take a load off. Now, it was like a military base. A lot of motels, a lot of places to eat, and a lot of places to buy equipment.

They dropped the demon off at what had once been the police station. Since they had all the right paperwork to be dealing in monster-hunting, nobody would touch their prisoner without explicit permission.

That was the way things worked now.

 Hopefully, the demon would be conscious by morning.

Safe under the harsh glow of spotlights, they checked into a motel. It was too early to sleep, but too late to do anything else of substance, save go to dinner. As with most places like this, it was a high carb, high fat fare. In the midst of it all was a tiny Italian restaurant.

‘I am kinda sick of fries,’ Morgan admitted, after JJ suggested it. Neither Emily nor Hotch had any complaints.

They weren’t the only customers, but they were the only hunters.

The atmosphere was cheery, compared to the doom and gloom of most places. Since there were electricity restrictions, each table was lit by candles, casting dark shadows across red and white checkerboard tablecloths. Mario Lanza played from tinny speakers that had probably been hand-cranked.

A man in a white tuxedo shirt and dark apron greeted them. ‘Table for four, right this way.’ He directed them towards a booth in the back of the restaurant, and passed out menus. ‘You want wine?’

JJ glanced at the table next to them, and saw a jug of dark red liquid. Even if they weren’t heading out early tomorrow morning, she probably wouldn’t have chanced it.

‘Just water, thanks,’ Hotch answered for them. They sat in silence, perusing the menus.

‘What’s _pizzoccheri_ like?’ Morgan asked, and JJ noticed Emily wince at his pronunciation.

‘You should probably just stick with the dishes you know,’ JJ suggested. In the end, he ordered spaghetti.

Maybe it was the food, maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the fact that Hotch kept shooting her glances when he thought she wasn’t looking. All JJ knew that for a few hours that night, she was almost happy.


	4. Chapter 4

The motel smelled like charcoal.

It was one of those smells that you never seemed to be able to get out, no matter how hard you scrubbed.

It was the same smell that had permeated JJ’s clothes – charcoal, along with blood, sweat, dust, and a strange variety of others that she couldn’t quite place. Laundry could only do so much.

The four of them were scattered around the room – Hotch at the small wooden table, Morgan on the edge of one bed, and Emily sitting cross-legged on the other. JJ herself was pacing, thoughts moving at a mile a minute.

If this were a case, they would have had a whiteboard, and files, and access to every single database that Garcia could access. It wasn’t, and all they had was paper and pens.

‘If they don’t have Reid, then where the hell is he?’ Morgan asked, voicing the question that had been plaguing everyone’s mind since the attack.

‘Do you think Sekhmet knows?’ JJ queried, not looking up. ‘She seemed…well-informed.’

‘How are we supposed to ask?’ Emily said, bitterly. ‘Oh, glorious Sekhmet, please answer our prayers?’

‘Sekhmet’s actions did show us one thing,’ Hotch said. ‘Not all of these demons are on the same side – the one that took Reid obviously isn’t in league with the demons that attacked us.’

‘So what the hell is so special about him that makes them all want to find him?’ Morgan asked. ‘Did something happen that made him the freaking demon lord?’ He shook his head. ‘Of all the people…Getting kidnapped by psychopaths isn’t enough, so the kid has to get himself kidnapped by demons, too.’ Judging by his tone of voice, he didn’t blame Reid for the abduction, but was rather, like the rest of them, frustrated by the unfairness of it.

But then, nothing was really fair any more. They’d all been through hell.

‘We can figure that part out later,’ Hotch said decidedly. ‘Right now, all we have are baseless theories – let’s focus on what we _do_ know.’

What they did know filled a pathetically short list. Really, the fact that they had once been an elite profiling unit seemed to mean fuck all. They were as in the dark as everyone else in the world.

In the end, they decided that they would be better off discussing it further once they had reunited with Rossi and Garcia. At least then, JJ thought privately, they’d have some outside perspective on the matter.

Still, it was past nine o’clock when JJ and Hotch retreated to their own motel room. The place was running on generator power, which meant that for a change, they actually had electricity.

‘I’m going to give you a hair-cut,’ JJ announced, as Hotch shrugged off his coat. He stared at her. After a few seconds, his lips quirked into a half smile.

‘I don’t get a say in this?’

‘Hotch, you look like Kurt Russell.’

‘And what is wrong with Kurt Russell?’ His tone of voice made it abundantly clear that he was joking, but she still gave him the look she usually reserved for Reid or Garcia.

Still, he didn’t argue further. He sat down in the wooden chair, and he took off his eyepatch. JJ tried not to stare.

Instead, she took the pair of scissors that she’d pilfered from Morgan and hovered a few inches above his head.

‘As short as it used to be?’

‘That’s fine,’ he said, quietly. There was something dark in his voice that JJ couldn’t quite interpret. The trouble was, these days, so much had happened that it was impossible to pin down one single bad thing.

She cut with a practiced hand – before…before _it_ , she had cut both Will and Henry’s hair. Just because it was the apocalypse, didn’t mean they had to look like wannabe rock-stars.

Hotch’s hair was smoother than she’d expected it to be. There was something about the way he’d combed it before that made her wonder if it was starched.

‘The beard is your responsibility,’ she told him, once the last snip was done. Part of her rued that direction though, because it wasn’t so much a beard as it was a mess of stubble. A sexy mess of stubble.

JJ knelt to the ground to sweep up the short dark hairs that were now littered everywhere. She’d forgotten to lay down a towel.

Once she’d finished cleaning up, she found Hotch staring at himself in the bathroom mirror. He’d reaffixed the eyepatch, and appeared to be contemplating his stubble. The fact that he hadn’t already whipped out a safety razor from his jacket pocket was a testament to how much things had changed.

That, and the whole “demon” thing.

There was a moment of awkwardness. JJ could almost hear her heart beating. She lifted her hand slowly, letting it rest against his cheek.

‘Jennifer…’ he said softly. The name sounded strange; no-one on the team had ever called her anything other than JJ.

She gave him a small smile. ‘You’re a profiler, Hotch. You have to know how much I…’ She paused, unable to find the right word. “Love” seemed too over the top, “appreciate” too understated. ‘How much I care about you.’

This was not a kind of vulnerability that Jennifer Jareau was used to showing, but she was tired of being closed off. Just because she was a tough as nails demon hunter didn’t mean she didn’t have a heart.

He let his hand rest against hers. ‘You never took the classes,’ he said, which seemed a little non-sequitur at first. ‘But you’re still a profiler, so I guess that means you know too.’

For Hotch, that was practically a declaration of his undying love. He leaned forward and kissed her softly. It was somehow simultaneously the most amazing and the most saddening thing in the world.

JJ pulled back gently, before returning the kiss with more ferocity. It was heat and it was hurt and it was lust, all in one touch of the lips.

His hand shifted down to her shoulder, as he gently led her out of the bathroom. ‘We don’t need to do this,’ he said, but it was painfully clear that he wanted to. Not even the stoic Aaron Hotchner could prevent the natural physiological reaction that had overwhelmed him. He wanted it just as much as she did.

‘With all due respect, Hotch,’ JJ breathed. ‘Be quiet and take off your pants.’

Hotch smiled. Even at the best of times, this was a rare thing, which, JJ thought decidedly, was a pity. His cheeks dimpled, and a light shone in his remaining eye.

‘You know,’ he said, unbuckling his belt. ‘I never realized you were so bossy.’

‘Well that’s because I was manipulating the BAU from behind the scenes,’ JJ told him matter-of-factly, lips pressed to his neck as she started on the buttons of his shirt. She sucked in a breath as she pushed it back over his shoulders.

The scars that George Foyet had given Aaron Hotchner had faded somewhat, but there was no missing the way the pale scar tissue contrasted against his chest hair.

There were monsters in the world long before there were demons.

‘I have a question for you,’ JJ said, as Hotch went to work on her pants. He paused in his ministrations against her throat. ‘Never mind,’ she said quickly, the warmth in her belly stirring. ‘Keep going.’

His lips soon reached her still-covered breasts. Any other man might have been overly passionate by this point, but Aaron Hotchner had the art of seduction down to a T. He moved slowly – almost maddeningly so – but it was that slowness that somehow made it all the more satisfying.

JJ let herself fall backwards onto the neatly made bed, her hands clutching at the coverings. For a man that (as far as she knew) had only ever had one sexual partner, he knew what he was doing.

God, she wasn’t even naked yet, and she was ready to come. Maybe that was just a side effect of not having had sex in a long time.

JJ reached up to cup Hotch through his boxers, and his whole body jerked in response. He was hard, and pulsating, and oh so ready to fuck her senseless. One handed, she started pulling at her own pants, eager to have him inside of her.

A thought hit her suddenly. ‘Do you have any condoms?’

Hotch stopped, frown creasing on his brow. ‘Shit.’

‘Morgan probably does,’ she suggested.

He gave her a look. ‘I am _not_ asking Morgan for condoms,’ he said with a half growl. JJ almost laughed.

‘I don’t mind if you don’t,’ she said decidedly. It was without a doubt not the best of ideas, but good ideas went out the window when things like sex started getting involved.

Hotch nodded, and JJ shimmied her pants down her legs. He wasn’t the only one with scars, but he didn’t stare – at least not at the scars. The look he gave her was lustful yet loving.

As Hotch pressed inside, she let her arms wrap around his shoulders. His thrusts were slow, but to JJ, the pace was perfect.

As though the rest of the world had come to a halt.

Afterwards, she redressed. Part of her wanted nothing more than to fall asleep in his embrace, skin against skin, but if something happened in the middle of the night, she did not want to be naked.

‘What was it you wanted to ask me?’ Hotch said, as she curled herself into his chest.

‘Oh.’ JJ bit her lip, trying to remember. Her eyelids wavered, and she let out a yawn. ‘Why “Bluejay”?’ she asked, but before he had a chance to answer she had drifted off to sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

_The birds are singing._

 _That’s the first indicator that something is wrong, because Emily Prentiss hasn’t heard the birds sing in a long time._

 _Of course, part of that is because they’ve been driving from place to place in the middle of nowhere for two years, but it’s also partly because the birds seem to have died off._

Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember, it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.

 _There are too many shades of green to put a name to them all. The trees are healthy, and undisturbed, as though they have never been touched by human hands. Some of the trees are bearing fruit; a brilliant yellow bird pecks at the seeds of something that looks kind of like a pomegranate._

 _This is like no place on Earth that Emily Prentiss has ever seen._

 _But of course, it isn’t Earth._

 _She walks for a long while, the forest becoming so thick that she can barely see the sky. There’s water somewhere in the distance; she can hear it. A creek, or a river, perhaps. If it’s a dream, it’s a vivid one, and yet she knows that she is not awake._

 _She has never been a lucid dreamer – never been able to weave entire worlds from her unconscious, has never been able to navigate such maze-like states, or tell herself that she needs to wake up. No. This is more than a dream._

 _The forest comes to an abrupt end, and she can’t quite help but let out a half gasp. A city lies in ruins before her, skeletons of skyscrapers reduced to dust and cinderblocks. She half expects to see a rusted Ferris wheel; it reminds her of Pripyat, flora and fauna thriving where no human feet dare to tread._

 _Is that what happened here? A nuclear explosion, or some other form of radiation? Or did civilization collapse due to other factors, like the Mayans, or the Anasazi?_

Why am I here?

 _An answer doesn’t come immediately, but somehow, she knows where she’s going. Her feet seem to be doing the thinking, step by step taking her into the heart of the city. It’s not a large city, compared to some of the one’s that Emily has seen, and she has seen a lot of cities._

 _Still, it seems to take a few hours to reach where she needs to go. After climbing over rubble, and pushing past bramble, she should be sweating, or itching, or bleeding, but she isn’t. Bitterly, she wonders why the hell the logistics of this dream are so insistent on her walking wherever the hell she needs to go._

 _She stops at a building that might have once been magnificent. It would have stood tall, shining against a bright blue sky, sun glinting off of tinted windows. This is where the demons had come from. Instead of making them more twisted, more horrible, somehow, it seems to make them more…human._

 _A light flickers, inside the building. Outside, it’s almost twilight. Time passes, even in this dream state._

 _She knows what she will find inside, even before she gets there. The fire flickers, and the man sitting in front of it warms his hands._

 _‘I was wondering when one of you was going to show up,’ he says simply. It’s his voice, but it’s not something that he would say. She wonders if this is the real Spencer Reid, warped by some demonic force, or if it’s just another facet of her dream._

 _‘You disappeared,’ she says, and it seems like the most stupid response in the world._

 _‘I’ve been busy,’ he replies simply. His voice is distant now, and she’s still not quite sure if it’s really him. ‘There’s a hole in the world…It’s the only way through. He knows…He knows.’_

 _There’s a long pause. ‘Reid?’ she says, tentatively. ‘Who knows?’_

 _‘Reid’s not here anymore,’ a voice says. It’s dark, and it’s dangerous, and it’s most certainly not Reid’s voice. He turns his head towards her, and his eyes are blood red. A wicked smile spreads across his face._

 _The pain hits her all of a sudden, like a knife to the stomach. She doubles over, knees striking the ground hard. The flames dance towards her, and she knows that she needs to run, but she can’t move, can’t even think._

 _A scream bursts from her body as it’s swallowed by the fire._

…

An unfettered scream tore Jennifer Jareau from sleep.

To be woken in the middle of the night was not a new experience. She was half out of bed, reaching for her socks when she realized that the scream was Emily’s. That JJ recognized it seemed like some kind of testament to what the team had been through, even before all of this. She knew that it would have been the same, had the scream been Reid’s or Garcia’s or even Hotch’s.

Not knowing what they were going to walk into, she took the extra thirty seconds or so to put on her boots. Beside her, Hotch was checking his rifle.

No words had passed between them. There was that unspoken, almost psychic knowledge that they _needed_ to find out what was happening.

Instead of going outside and around, it was quicker to break down the adjoining door between the two rooms. Already, JJ could feel the heat of fire.

 _What the hell is going on?_

The door splintered after a few solid kicks, and JJ consented to let Hotch enter first. With the flames came smoke, and JJ blinked away the sudden sting in her eyes.

‘Give me a hand!’ Morgan yelled. He was by one of the beds, trying to pull a non-cooperative Emily away from the flames. Her eyes were shut, and she seemed to be muttering something under her breath. ‘There’s a bucket in the bathroom,’ he said, and it seemed almost non-sequitur, until JJ realized that he wanted to put out the fire.

It seemed a fool’s hope, but she ran to the bathroom anyway, tossing out the dirty water Morgan had apparently used to wash his socks.

The flames died with a surprising quickness that cemented JJ’s suspicion that they were of a supernatural origin. Still, she’d half expected the water to make them burn even brighter. Morgan grabbed the blanket from the other bed, and wrapped it around Emily, who was now shivering. Her lips still moved, muttering words too soft and too garbled for JJ to understand.

‘This has happened before?’ Hotch asked sharply.

‘The night she was possessed,’ Morgan replied.

JJ felt her eyebrows raise. ‘What, you think it’s happened again?’

‘It’s not the same,’ Morgan explained, but he didn’t elaborate. ‘We need to get out of here.’ He lifted Emily into his arms. ‘Can you get our gear?’

Hotch nodded. ‘It’s easier if we just take one car.’

JJ didn’t argue. It was bad enough in the cities, but out here…if anyone got wind of anything even vaguely demon-related, then they were all dead, hunters or no. They needed to get out of town as quickly as possible.

Stepping ahead of Morgan JJ held her shotgun with one hand, and opened the door with the other.

Her heart fell.

Someone was already there.

It was unsurprising really – with the flames and the screaming, it was unlikely that no-one would have noticed, but they couldn’t have been in a worse position. Emily was still speaking in tongues, and their only way out was blocked by a guy with a rifle.

‘Move,’ she ordered, with a ferocity that she hadn’t felt in a long while. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’

‘Seems to me like you’re bringing trouble whether you want it or not,’ he said. His hair was ragged, his beard unshaven, and his accent Canadian.

‘Move and we won’t have to find out.’

‘There’s not anyone here that’ll let you walk free if you’ve got a demon with you.’ He leveled his weapon at her chest.

‘Move, or you _will_ regret it.’ JJ’s finger started to squeeze against the trigger. She didn’t want to pull it, but it didn’t look like she had a choice.

 _You never took the classes, but you’re still a profiler._

JJ pulled the trigger.

…

Her body shook as they ran to the cars. She didn’t look back to see whether Morgan and Hotch were following her. The heavy footsteps and panting told her that they were.

‘Which car?’ she called out.

‘The Ford,’ Hotch answered. ‘It’s bigger.’ For one fleeting second, she looked into his eyes, and saw the look that she didn’t want to see. It was some kind of mix between disappointment and surprise. JJ tried to ignore it. There were bigger things at stake.

‘Keys are in my bag,’ Morgan told them. Hotch dug through the bag quickly and unlocked the car. JJ slid into the passenger’s seat.

‘How is she?’ JJ asked, not daring to look back. She clutched the shotgun tightly, half afraid that they might run into more resistance.

‘Still shaking,’ Morgan announced. ‘And still murmuring. I think it’s Arabic.’

‘Big history of demonology in Arabian mythology,’ Hotch commented. Nobody sounded surprised; it was something that they all knew from endless nights of research and speculation.

‘But then she speaks Arabic anyway,’ Morgan replied.

‘So what, you think the whole “setting half the room on fire” wasn’t demon related?’ JJ asked, disbelieving. It was bad enough when he was skeptical about cases, but this…?

‘I’m just saying maybe they did something to her, and she _isn’t_ possessed right now.’

‘If she’s possessed…’ JJ started. ‘We need to exorcise it.’ Thanks to Hotch’s somewhat haphazard driving, they were back on the highway, going faster than was recommended for this time of night in this part of the country. She took a chance and turned back to take a look.

Things had quieted somewhat. The blanket was stilled wrapped tightly around her, but the shaking was much less pronounced. Aside from the mutterings, she was catatonic. Morgan’s arms were holding her tightly, as though he was afraid to let go.

‘I don’t exactly have a portable exorcism kit with me, JJ,’ he said, exasperated. His dark eyes swam with fear.

‘Demon’s tail,’ Hotch said suddenly.

‘What?’ JJ asked, confused.

‘Demon’s tail,’ he repeated. ‘If she’s possessed, it’ll draw it out – Sekhmet gave me some.’

 ‘You think she knew this was going to happen?’ JJ queried, as Hotch took one hand off the wheel and dug a small object out of his pocket. He passed it to JJ, who stared at it for half a second before handing it back to Morgan. It looked like a small, horned, rubbery stick. Not some conveyor of great magical powers.

‘I don’t know,’ Hotch said, with a shake of his head.

‘How do I use this thing?’ Morgan asked, examining the tail.

‘Blood,’ JJ told him simply. Nobody asked her how she knew, a fact for which she was supremely grateful. ‘Just cut your finger, press it to the tail and focus your thoughts on wiping out any evil presence – it works off your psychic energy.’

For a brief moment, Morgan looked doubtful, but the thought of saving Emily apparently outweighed any misgivings he might have had about using magic that he didn’t understand. He took a knife from his pocket, and sliced open his thumb.

His eyes closed, and he whispered something under his breath – a prayer?

It didn’t happen immediately, but when it did, a soft, unearthly glow filled the car. It somehow seemed warming, even though the last time JJ had seen such a glow was not a happy one.

After about a minute, Emily gave a shuddering gasp, and fell back, silent. The glow dissipated and Morgan put two fingers to her neck.

‘Heart’s still beating,’ he said, with a sigh of relief. ‘And the muttering has stopped. Whatever it was, it’s gone now.’

There was a long, painful silence. ‘So what do we do now?’ Morgan asked.

JJ didn’t even need to think before she spoke. The answer was so clear, even if it was what they’d been trying to do all along. ‘Now, we get the team back together.’


	6. Chapter 6

Of all the people in the world that Penelope Garcia had expected to end up living with, David Rossi was not one of them.

But then, of course, they had been invaded by evil creatures from another world, and all expectations went out the window entirely.

All things considered, it wasn’t a terrible living arrangement. Two technical analysts and a star profiler share an apartment in post-apocalyptic Denver. It sounded like the pitch to a new show on the SyFy Channel. Of course, the SyFy Channel didn’t exist anymore. The only things that were ever really shown on TV anymore were reruns and news broadcasts.

 Of all the things that people wanted in a post-apocalyptic world, information was the most important one, and information was something that Garcia could provide in abundance. Now, though, it was tracking the movements of a rogue werewolf through Colorado, rather than digging through databases to find an unsub’s sordid history.

It was something of a business. A business that had paid for the rather nice two-bedroomed apartment that she woke up in on a bright October morning.

‘Morning snookums.’ Garcia rolled over and pressed a kiss to Kevin Lynch’s shoulder. The other former technical analyst was still half asleep and half covered by a blanket. Garcia took the moment to appreciate his abs, which had become rather spectacular in the past months.

‘Morning,’ Kevin yawned.

Garcia poked him in the stomach. ‘Ow,’ he said with a moan. ‘What was that for?’

‘I went to the downtown markets yesterday afternoon – Rodriguez has restocked on his homemade marshmallows. I was _going_ to make marshmallow pancakes, but if you’re not interested…’

 _That_ got his attention. He sat up, groping for his glasses on the nightstand. ‘ Marshmallow pancakes?’

‘With maple syrup and peanut butter,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘That is, if we have enough gas.’

‘It’s almost the end of the month,’ Kevin reasoned. ‘We haven’t been doing that much cooking, have we?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Garcia said, shaking her head. They had a limited amount of utilities per month, and overuse usually meant going without. ‘Check the spreadsheet.’

They showered together, which was mostly a matter of convenience, but it did have its advantages. When they emerged, Rossi was at the small dining table, drinking weak coffee, and scanning a laptop screen.

‘Did you see this?’ he asked with a frown, without even bothering to look up. ‘News alert went out this morning – four individuals wanted in suspicious demon activity in Grenville, New Mexico. Two men, two women.’

‘You don’t think—’ Garcia started. ‘Oh jenkies. Suspicious demon activity? That does not sound good.’

‘The descriptions fit.’ Rossi paused. He didn’t mention that slight issue that it should have been three men, three women. Instead, he said something much worse.‘It also says that they shot a man.’

Garcia’s heart started beating a million times a minute. There was no way that any of them would have shot someone like that. It had to be some other group of people.

‘Wipe it from the alert database,’ Garcia ordered. She didn’t want to take any chances.

‘Do you want to—?’

‘No. I don’t want to read it.’ Rossi gave her a look that was halfway between bemusement and disbelief. He didn’t argue though, and pressed a few keys (much slower than Garcia herself could have done it). David Rossi, hacker extraordinaire was a description that didn’t quite fit, no matter how much he’d learned over the past month.

‘We should at least call them,’ Kevin reasoned. Garcia didn’t disagree. The phones were not used often. Cell service was sporadic, at best, and the cost of minutes was astronomical. It was more efficient to use code-words and recorded messages.

She grabbed her phone from the dining table where it was sitting in amongst the mess of other computing equipment.

 _One missed call_ , said the screen, and Garcia swore. How the hell had she missed a call?

Fingers shaking, she accessed her voicemail. _One new message_ , the voice said. She listened, apprehensive. ‘ _Dionysus, two seven three_ ,’ said JJ’s voice. ‘ _Choc-fudge ripple._ ’ The call had come through at about three o’clock in the morning, which meant either there were some interesting coincidences at play, or things had happened exactly as Garcia had feared.

‘They’re coming today,’ she announced, hanging up the phone. She did a quick calculation in her head. ‘Soon, if nothing goes wrong.’

A slight pause.

‘We should probably wait on those pancakes.’

…

As she came to consciousness, Emily could feel the sun on her face, the blanket itching against her skin. Her body was twisted at a strange, uncomfortable angle, and unless she was sorely mistaken, someone had wrapped their arms around her chest.

She remembered the dream – the vision? – and then…fire, and pain. Her mind burned, as though it was overflowing.

Emily twisted, and the person holding her (she was almost entirely certain that it was Morgan, judging by the muscles) reacted immediately. She sat up as much as she could, pulling off the blanket.’

‘Emily?’ said a voice by her ear – definitely Morgan.

‘Get me a pen,’ she murmured, hand rubbing against the crick in her neck. She didn’t dare try to open her eyes. If she opened her eyes, it would almost certainly wash away, like the tide. The sleeping position told her that they were in the car, sounds from the engine corroborating that fact.

‘Prentiss…’ His voice was lower this time. More persistent.

‘I’m fine,’ she insisted. ‘Just get me a pen and some paper.’

She heard Morgan rummage around, keeping one arm wrapped around her.

‘Do you remember what happened?’ Hotch asked, his voice coming from the driver’s seat.

‘Bits and pieces,’ she told him. ‘But I can guess the rest.’ It wasn’t a complete lie. After all, why else would they be on the road already? Whatever had happened, it wasn’t something good.

‘Here,’ Morgan said, pressing a pen into her hand. He directed the tip of the pen until it hit a solid surface. ‘You’re at the top of the page.’

Her hand moved fluidly, unfamiliar lines coming without a trace of conscious thought.

‘Prentiss…’

‘Quiet,’ she told him, a lot more sharply than he deserved. ‘Sorry, just…give me a second.’ It was almost a minute before she put down the pen, and opened her eyes. The sudden assault of light flooded her vision, and she blinked away the spots.

Morgan’s face was creased with concern, and Emily couldn’t exactly blame him. Whatever was happening to her, it wasn’t natural.

Hand still clutching the pen, Emily looked down at the page she’d written on. At first, the symbols seemed like random gibberish, but slowly they became clearer. Like a language that only she could read.

And yet…

It was like there was still one puzzle piece that wouldn’t quite click into place. One thing that could somehow make her understand what the demonic language meant. One thing that could somehow make her understand what the hell was going on.

‘What does it say?’ JJ asked, leaning back from the passenger’s seat. There was a darkness in her eyes that Emily had never seen before. Maybe it was always there, and she’d just never noticed.

‘I don’t know,’ Emily murmured. ‘It’s like…the answer’s on the tip of my tongue. I feel like I’ve seen these symbols before.’ She shook her head, pulling out of Morgan’s grip. He let go, if a little reluctantly, and she slid over to the other seat. ‘Where are we?’ she asked Hotch, who would no doubt have a better understanding of the route they were taking.

‘Around fifty miles outside of Denver,’ he answered. ‘We should be there soon.’

“Soon” somehow turned out to be simultaneously too soon and not soon enough for Emily’s liking. It had been weeks since they’d last been in a real city, but that hadn’t exactly been a wonderful visit.

She wondered if she could ever look David Rossi in the eyes again.

…

The city of Denver did not look the same as it had before the demons had come. One of the few protected cities, it was not protected by walls but by guns. There was always talk about putting up a boundary, but it never seemed to get very far. The city had grown so much that it would take far too long to build.

In any case, a wall couldn’t stop the demons from breaking through.

JJ stared out the window.

A lot of the food production took place in the fringe areas of the city; before the end of the world, Eastern Colorado had been a significant farming region, but when werewolves and demons were wont to decimate any isolated points of civilization, it had come to a halt.

This close to the city, crop production wouldn’t be fantastic, but it was better than going hungry. It was better than getting needlessly slaughtered.

Inside the city itself, traffic was heavy. Hotch seemed at home behind the driver’s seat; they were all used to getting around unfamiliar cities, and Aaron Hotchner wasn’t going to let something like an eyepatch get in the way of his leadership. Of course, now cars were a much rarer method of transport; “traffic” meant bikes, horses, roller-skates – anything that provided something faster than travelling on foot.

‘You’re sure you won’t be recognized?’ Hotch asked of Morgan and Prentiss. JJ didn’t know the full details of their demon incident, but it had been as bad as the one this morning, then it would have drawn a lot of attention.

‘We got out quickly,’ Emily said shortly. ‘Before Rossi was even out of surgery.’ There was regret in her voice, which was completely unsurprising.

Regret was something that they all had in common.

…

‘…I don’t need your help,’ came Emily Prentiss’ disgruntled voice, and Garcia couldn’t quite help but let her mouth split into a wide grin. It had been a long time since the whole team had been together. So long, that she’d decided to stand at the top of the stairs, instead of waiting around inside for the knock on the door.

‘Princess, after what happened this morning, you’re damn lucky I’m not _carrying_ you up these stairs. Baby girl, what—’ His words were cut short as Garcia practically jumped on him, arms wrapping him in an awkward hug. Awkward, mostly because he had at least three bags slung over his shoulder, one of which seemed to be Emily’s.

‘Have you been getting yourselves into trouble again?’ Garcia asked, frowning.

‘I’m pretty sure trouble seems to find _us_ ,’ JJ answered. Garcia squealed, dropping Morgan almost immediately. She loved her hunk of chocolate spunk, but she hadn’t seen JJ in _forever_.

‘You are _never_ leaving my sight again, Miss Jareau,’ Garcia said, shaking her head. ‘Two _years_? I have missed you like crazy.’

‘Garcia, if you hug JJ any tighter, you’re going to have to answer to Hotch,’ Morgan said, somewhat amused. JJ pulled away, giving Morgan a look.

‘And why exactly would she be answering to me?’ Hotch asked, with a raised eyebrow, as he came into view. He looked a lot more ragged than when Garcia had last seen him, over six months previously.

‘Probably because of the illicit love affair,’ Garcia said jovially. At the look on his face, she stopped, startled. ‘Oh my God, there _is_ an illicit love affair?’

‘This is what we get for working with profilers,’ JJ muttered. Garcia was about to chastise her friend for being so indignant, before she realized that there was no-one else coming up the stairs.

‘Hotch…what happened to Reid and Seaver?’ she asked, her voice high.

Hotch gave a grimace. ‘That’s why we’re here,’ he said.

‘Please tell me they’re not dead, Hotch.’ She could feel the tears swimming in her eyes. There were some things in this world that she would get used to, but this wasn’t one of them.

‘Let’s go inside,’ he said, matter-of-factly. She could see the strain in his expression. She could _hear_ the strain in his voice.

Garcia delegated the task of pancake-making to Kevin, and set herself down on the sofa next to JJ. ‘So,’ she said, demandingly. ‘ _What_ is going on?’

…

It took almost an hour to bring Garcia, Kevin and Rossi up to speed on the events, during which Emily had forced down the plate of pancakes that Kevin had given her. It wasn’t that they were inedible (he’d been wise enough to give her the chocolate chip ones instead of the marshmallow) but her stomach still roiled from what had happened that morning.

More than that, it roiled from the fact that David Rossi was sitting right next to her, and he didn’t even seem to acknowledge what had happened the previous month. Last time she’d heard, he was on crutches, but that seemed to have changed – maybe sometime in the last few weeks, judging by the way he rubbed at his thigh.

Whatever’d happened, it could have been much, much worse.

‘Rossi,’ she said abruptly, breaking whatever silence had overcome the group. ‘Can we talk?’

She felt Morgan’s hand on her back, but ignored it.

‘Sure,’ Rossi said. The expression on his face was unreadable, but he had to have been expecting this. He had to have known that there was no way she was going to let it slide.

He led her into one of the bedrooms, and let the door click behind them.

Emily let her hands wring, pacing.

 ‘Are you two…?’ He gestured towards the door. While he didn’t mention a name, it wasn’t difficult to figure out his train of thought.

‘What?’ Emily asked, a little dumbfounded. Of all the things she had expected him to ask, that wasn’t it. ‘No. Why would we be?’

‘You two were always close. I just thought that after I left you might have—’

‘After you _left_?’ she repeated, shaking her head. ‘Please don’t try and skirt around this thing, Rossi.’

 ‘What do you want me to say, Prentiss?’ Rossi asked, exasperated. ‘That I blame you for getting possessed by a demon and throwing me out a window?’

‘That would be a start!’ Emily shot back.

‘Well I’m sorry, no matter how much your Catholic guilt demands it, I don’t blame you for what happened.’

‘Well you could at least acknowledge that I did it!’ Emily sat on the edge of the bed, head in her hands. She didn’t speak for several minutes. ‘It happened again this morning,’ she told him, finally. ‘I was having this dream – a vision, I think. Reid was in it, only he was a demon, and then he looked into my eyes, and…I don’t know. It wasn’t the same, but…it _felt_ the same, you know?’

He didn’t know. He _couldn’t_ know, but he nodded anyway.

‘Whatever’s happened…whatever we’ve done, it’s nobody’s fault. We’re reacting. We’re _surviving_ , and the only thing we _can_ do is keep surviving.’

Emily shook her head. ‘I don’t know how you can be so goddamn optimistic about all of this,’ she muttered. Rossi gave a smile, but there was pain behind it.

The discussion was far from over.

…

JJ stared at herself in the mirror. She looked – and felt – like she was stuck in the middle of an apocalypse. Her hair was knotted, her skin scarred, and the bags under her eyes looked almost like bruises. With everything going on in the world, she could never stay in one of the protected cities for too long, but there was something to be said about the comfort of it all.

She’d tried to remain detached when retelling her side of the events from this morning, but she couldn’t ignore the fact that she had shot an innocent man. She hadn’t missed the looks that the rest of them gave her.

It wasn’t the first person she’d killed. Something told her that it wouldn’t be the last.

Outside, they were no doubt discussing how best to rescue Reid, or how to get in contact with Sekhmet. They weren’t thinking about how Jennifer Jareau had put her own life ahead of someone else’s.

She started at the sound of a knock on the door.

‘JJ,’ Hotch said. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Yeah,’ JJ said. She knew he wasn’t coming in to brush his teeth, but she let him in anyway.

‘Is everything okay?’ he asked, in that caring, authoritative tone that was just so…Hotch.

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted with a sigh.

‘You know he would have shot you.’ It was true, that much JJ knew. In places like that, it was “shoot first, ask questions later.” ‘You did what you had to do.’ His hand took hers, and rubbed it gently. She relished the touch, but knew that she didn’t deserve it.

‘I didn’t tell you the whole truth,’ she said bluntly. ‘When…when we were ambushed, Will was possessed. He killed Henry right in front of me before I had a chance to do anything about it.’

Hotch was silent, and JJ hated herself for bringing it up. As far as she knew, Jack was alive and well with Jessica in D.C., but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured.

JJ shook her head. ‘I don’t like it, but I’ve dealt with it. Pulling that trigger today…it was hard, but I had to do it. And part of me hates that. But I know that I’ll do whatever I have to to make sure that we get through this.’

‘We all will,’ Hotch said simply, and JJ knew that it was true. But no matter how much she wanted to see hope in their future, all she could see was death.


	7. Chapter 7

As much as Morgan hated to admit it, they were stuck in a holding pattern.

It seemed to go without saying that they needed to rescue Reid, but the logistics of that endeavor was something that nobody could quite figure out. They didn’t know where he was, they didn’t know what had happened to him…

It wasn’t a needle in a haystack. It was like a needle in a whole warehouse full of haystacks, and even then, the needle was probably in another dimension.

All they had to go on was a vision, some symbols that nobody could read, and the words of a former coworker that was sharing a body with a demon.

‘I have an option that I know is going to be super unpopular,’ Garcia said, over breakfast the next morning. Nobody was looking particularly awake; seven people split between two beds and living room furniture wasn’t a comfortable arrangement for any of them. ‘We probably have the right equipment to summon Sekhmet.’

Emily bit back a noise of disagreement. Garcia shot her a look. ‘What? You have another idea?’

‘No, I think it’ll work,’ Emily said, giving a half shrug. ‘I’m just wondering whether or not we’re all going to come out of this apocalypse with horns and a tail.’

‘Well, demon can be a pretty sexy Halloween costume.’

‘As sexy as it may be, I feel like my soul is kinda tarnished enough already.’

‘Not all demon summonings are bad,’ Garcia said pointedly. ‘There are all kinds of reasons for summoning a demon. It’s not just a “do as I command” kind of thing.’

‘Baby girl, the things we’ve been doing, we haven’t exactly had much experience with the “good” kind of demon summoning,’ Morgan said, gently. He looked towards Hotch, whose arms were folded, his expression hard. It was impossible to tell what the other man was thinking. His opinion would hold more influence than anyone else’s.

‘I think we should do it,’ Hotch said finally, and Morgan was only a little bit surprised. After all, Hotch was the one who had been there at the start of it. If they didn’t get Reid and Seaver back, then it was Hotch that would feel the overwhelming guilt.

Once upon a time, Morgan would have argued the point.

The fact that he didn’t was as much a testament to how desperate the situation was, as it was an indication of how much he had changed.

Before they left, they planned.

Evidently, Garcia’s readings on the literature surrounding demon summonings had been much wider than the rest of theirs. With her analytical skills, she had managed to put together some viable solutions to their problem, viable meaning, options that don’t rely on human sacrifice or slitting the throats of a thousand puppies.

‘We can stop by the downtown markets on our way out of town,’ Garcia announced. ‘We should be able to pick up everything we need.’ They’d come to the conclusion that even if it _was_ a “good” summoning, so to speak, there was no way they could conduct it within the city limits – it was the kind of thing that would have seen them burned at the stake for witchcraft.

With that, it seemed to be finalized.

‘Pack light,’ Hotch instructed them, but it was mostly unneeded. There was no way that they would be able to take a vehicle, and even then, if they were going to be doing some multi-dimensional adventuring, it wouldn’t be a good idea to be lugging around a suitcase.

Morgan unpacked his duffel bag and started redistributing its contents into his backpack. Most of it was clothing, which he tossed aside immediately, keeping only a second pair of jeans, some underwear, and a couple of t-shirts. Clean clothing was not exactly one of their priorities.

With any luck, they would survive long enough to return.

…

Out on the street, Garcia took the lead, something that JJ endorsed completely. The former technical analyst had spent two years in Denver, and probably knew the city like it was the information superhighway.

‘We can take the Number 3 bus to the downtown markets, and then the Number 6 to the edge of town,’ Garcia told them, authoritatively.

‘And what, we just walk after that?’ Morgan asked, giving a slight frown. JJ understood his meaning – it wasn’t exactly hot out, but they wanted to get a fair way away before attempting anything that would draw attention to them.

‘Not exactly,’ Garcia said, and even though JJ could only see Garcia’s back, she could _hear_ the amusement in the other woman’s voice. ‘Tell me – how many of you can ride a horse?’

JJ could. East Allegheny had been good for some things that weren’t soccer. She wasn’t exactly an all-star champion, but she could hold her own. Emily could ride, which wasn’t surprising, and so could Rossi and Hotch, which was, a little.

The Number 3 bus was crowded, and smelled a little like burnt flesh. JJ let her hand rest against her thigh, loosely gripping her shotgun. Between them, they had enough firepower to go up against most gangs, so hopefully, there wouldn’t be too much trouble. In any case, the neighborhood where they got off the bus didn’t look too bad, compared to some parts of the city that they had seen.

‘We should split up, if we want to get this done quickly,’ Hotch said, and JJ privately agreed. Garcia starting scribbling out lists.

‘Here,’ Garcia passed a list to Hotch. ‘You and JJ can go to the spice emporium – it’s three blocks west from here. Meet back at the crossroads in half an hour.’ There was a devious look on Garcia’s face, and JJ knew that her being paired with Hotch was no coincidence.

Hotch didn’t seem to think so either, judging by the small smile he gave, as they headed off west.

‘Do you really think this is going to work?’ JJ asked, stepping to one side to avoid the half dozen chickens that had inexplicably decided to cross their path. A man in torn khakis ran after them, yelling in Spanish. As they reached the next tent by the side of the road, JJ saw a rotisserie, boasting a variety of meats.

There was a part of her that wanted to chickens to win.

‘We’ve both seen what magic can do,’ Hotch said grimly. ‘If it can call a demon, it can open a doorway…We just need the right key.’

‘If we do this, there’s no guarantee we’ll ever make it home.’

‘I don’t care what’s happened over the last two years,’ Hotch said. ‘More than anything else, this team is family. You don’t leave family behind. We are going to bring Reid home.’

There was a pause, and JJ gave Hotch a disdainful look. ‘Don’t think I can’t tell when you’re plotting something, Aaron. I may not be a profiler, but I’ve known you for almost ten years.’

He didn’t answer straight away. ‘It’s not a solid plan,’ he admitted. ‘But suppose there was a way of…flushing Sekhmet out.’

‘Saving Seaver, you mean?’ JJ asked, giving a slight frown. ‘I’m not saying it’s impossible, but summoning a demon is one thing. Pissing one off…I mean, she did help us, right? And it’s not as though Seaver’s being hurt.’ The last part was said with a sarcastic tone; JJ knew the importance of playing Devil’s advocate (no pun intended) but she wasn’t naïve. The mere fact that Sekhmet hadn’t ripped them limb from limb didn’t mean shit.

‘For all we know, that was just something to keep us placated,’ Hotch said, gloomily.

There was another pause, as they turned into the spice emporium. The smell overwhelmed JJ’s senses. ‘When did we get so cynical?’ she murmured, staring at a barrel of what looked like sage.

‘When the world was overthrown by the forces of darkness?’ Hotch asked. He scanned the list, and grabbed a worn plastic basket from a mismatched stack. There was something strange about their conversation, but JJ couldn’t quite place her finger on it. Maybe it because they had never really been open with each other in this way.

It seemed almost ironic that it had to wait until, as Hotch had said, the world was overthrown by the forces of darkness.

Go figure.

She loved Will, and part of her would always love Will, but she couldn’t ignore her feelings for Hotch, either. It was like _Dawson’s Creek_ mixed with _Silent Hill_.

Fifteen minutes later, they were back at the crossroads, Hotch carrying a large paper bag filled with the kind of ingredients you would use to summon a demon. No eye of newt or toe of frog, fortunately. A bizarre image formed in her mind of her, Garcia and Emily dressed as the Weird Sisters. The fact that that somehow _wasn’t_ stranger than the situation they were already in was no comfort.

The rest of the team was already waiting, Morgan leaning against a disused mail box with his arms folded. ‘We ready?’

‘As we’ll ever be,’ JJ said with a grimace. The bus came within ten minutes – this one smelled like rotten eggs. By the time they made it to the outskirts of the city, it was almost sundown. Nobody even mentioned the possibility of staying the night in a motel. They were going to keep moving if it killed them.

Of course, finding a place that was willing to rent them out horses indefinitely was the hard part. However, once Garcia handed over a wad of notes, and, for some reason, a cucumber, the stable owner was much more willing to discuss the issue.

‘I think it’s time for a girl’s night out,’ Garcia commented, as she mounted the horse behind JJ. Kevin rode with Rossi, and Morgan with Hotch – if they came under attack, then Hotch’s eyepatch would put him at a disadvantage. The fact that they were riding at night through unknown territory was a pretty bad disadvantage as well, but no-one brought it up. The torches would have to do.

‘Take this,’ JJ said, unclipping one of her holsters from her belt and passing it over to Garcia. ‘I can’t shoot and ride at the same time.’

‘My aim is pretty bad,’ Garcia said, but she took the gun anyway.

‘As long as you don’t shoot one of us, baby girl, I think we’ll be okay.’ Morgan had his rifle pointed to the ground. Hotch, to his credit, didn’t look remotely worried. Trust was a funny thing.

The horses were restless. That much was clear almost immediately. JJ ran her hand along her horse’s mane. His name, according to the stable-owner, was Jinx. Jinx didn’t seem to think much of being hired out by an amateur rider in the middle of the evening. JJ didn’t blame him.

Emily was trotting her horse slowly, while Rossi was still trying to get his under control. The circumstances weren’t ideal, but then, it wasn’t as though they were riding through an obstacle course. For the most part, it would just be straight riding, providing nothing went wrong.

Of course, things _always_ went wrong.


	8. Chapter 8

The dark sky twinkled with stars.

It had taken several hours at the fastest pace they could manage to get far enough away from the town that a pitchfork wielding mob wouldn’t start after them if they summoned a demon.

Things had been crazy for a while, but this was about the craziest thing yet, Morgan decided. Two years ago, if anyone had told him he’d be conducting rituals involving blood and chicken feathers, he would have thought that they were delusional.

They wouldn’t do the whole “demon-summoning” ritual tonight, though – they had the ingredients, but they needed to double check the procedure, just to make sure that something didn’t go horribly wrong.

They didn’t want to mistranslate something, and accidently summon Cthulu by mistake.

It might have sounded kinda funny, but those were the kind of fuck-ups that got other prospective demon-summoners killed every day.

Now, they were sitting around a campfire, with a couple of tarpaulins strung up for shelter. The horses were tied to a nearby tree, happily munching on the carrot sticks that Garcia had brought along.

‘So.’ JJ said. Morgan thought he could see a dark look in her eyes, but maybe that was just the result flickering shadows from the fire.  ‘How do we do this?’

‘Track down Reid and outsmart the all-powerful demon,’ Rossi surmised. ‘Doesn’t sound too hard.’

Between them, they had half a dozen books on the various ways of killing, summoning, controlling and otherwise dealing with supernatural creatures. The things that worked were marked with post-it notes or highlighted or circled, depending on who had been the one reading it. There were more books, back in Denver, but the things were a little bulky, which meant that they’d had to prioritize.

In his pocket, he had the piece of paper covered in symbols that Emily had written out yesterday morning (was it only _yesterday?_ ).

‘How do we make her do what we ask, though?’

‘There’s a spell for binding them,’ Garcia said, flipping through the book on her lap. ‘It’s risky, but we might be able to exchange a favor in exchange for letting her free.’

‘ _Blackmail_ the all-powerful demon,’ Emily said, deadpan. ‘Sounds like we’re _definitely_ not going to get ourselves slaughtered.’

  

  1. He was angry at the fact that they were stuck in a world that was filled with demons, and werewolves and a whole bunch of other creatures that would tear his throat out for the mere crime of existing.
  



‘I don’t think anyone’s saying that we shouldn’t fight back,’ Hotch said evenly. ‘We’re all on edge right now, so I think that we should wait until tomorrow before we attempt any spells.’

Privately, Morgan was certain that waiting a day would make sure they were even _more_ on edge, but questioning Hotch’s leadership wasn’t going to do anyone any favors, so he kept his mouth shut.

Maybe that was a lesson he was supposed to have learned ten years ago.

They spread their sleeping mats out just far enough apart to give them all a little space, but Morgan couldn’t help but notice that some people stayed closer together than others.

Not bothering to change into something a little more suited to sleep, he took off his jeans and belt, satisfied that boxers would provide adequate cover.

An ominous silence crept through the air, as, one by one, each of them fell to sleep.

…

When JJ woke, the sun was still low in the sky. According to her watch, it was a little past 7am.

Hotch, Garcia and Emily were awake already, sitting around the embers of last night’s fire. It looked as though they were sorting through what spell ingredients they had.

‘Morning, sunshine,’ Garcia said, dumping a bag of oregano onto the pile on the left.

‘You can use oregano to cast a spell?’ JJ asked, mildly surprised.

‘Nooo,’ Garcia said, with unnecessary emphasis. ‘The oregano is for breakfast. To go with the freeze-dried bacon and scrambled eggs.’

‘We should get everyone up,’ Hotch said. His expression was stoic, and yet JJ could tell he was steeling himself for the hours to come. ‘We can’t put it off forever.’

‘Shouldn’t we do it at night?’ Garcia asked, frowning slightly.

‘Does it matter?’ JJ raised an eyebrow.

‘I don’t know. It seems like the thing to do,’ Garcia offered, a little apologetically. ‘You know, the witching hour?’

‘Look at it this way, baby girl,’ Morgan said, stretching as he pulled himself out of his sleeping bag. ‘At least it won’t be as terrifying during the day.’

‘We’re summoning a demon,’ Garcia said. ‘I think it’s going to be terrifying regardless.’

‘All the more reason to do it when none of us will get a heart attack from our own shadow,’ Emily added, almost gloomily.

They roused Kevin and Rossi, and had what might probably be their last breakfast together. Like some kind of weird Last Supper thing.

‘Okay,’ Garcia announced, once they’d cleaned up their dirty plates. ‘We have a summoning spell, and a binding spell. I just wish we had a “time travel” spell, too.’

On Garcia’s instruction, JJ crushed what looked like dried eyeballs into a fine powder, before sprinkling it over the circle that had been drawn in the dirt. JJ had stuck with guns over magic, so she hoped like hell that Garcia knew what she was doing. Out of all of them, though, the technical analyst was probably the one she would have picked most likely to be able to pull off the “summoning a demon” act, save for maybe Reid.

‘Okay, Warrior Prentiss, you’re our perfectly provocative polyglot. You want to give chanting a shot?’ Garcia handed the book over to Emily, who raised an eyebrow.

‘ _Sekhmet vocamus, daemon aliarum terrarum bello et dea sanitatis._ ’ Her brow crinkled. ‘Who translated this Latin?’

‘I speak in computer code, not dead languages,’ Garcia said, feigning offence. ‘Besides, I’m pretty sure it works on intent, rather than the words themselves.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Emily muttered, as she repeated the chant. Garcia tossed a handful of the second herb mixture into the embers of the fire. It flashed orange, and then shot a bright blue flame six feet into the air. If they’d been under the tarp, it would have burned a hole straight through it.

One of the horses neighed in fright, but JJ was a little too distracted by the appearance of a figure in the fire. Sekhmet’s eyes flared with something that might have been anger, but it was hard to tell. She stepped out of the circle.

 _Oh shit_.

JJ’s hand went straight to her weapon. Without even looking around, she knew that everyone else was moving to draw as well, but they didn’t. Some overwhelming force kept her hand hovering at her thigh, and no amount of mental or physical exertion could move it.

‘You think me a fool?’ Sekhmet thundered. She scoffed. ‘Worse than that; you think me an unsympathetic fool. I see the thoughts in your mind. I know what you would do to me. The horrors of your imagination are nothing compared to what I could do to you. You would suffer the fires of infinite purgatories, the lashes of infinite whips…But I help you freely, because our cause is the same.’

Sekhmet released her hold on them, and JJ steadied herself before she could fall backwards.

‘So, what?’ Morgan asked, clearly skeptical about the whole situation. ‘You want to help us save the world, just like that? How exactly is that going to work?’

‘Your friend – Doctor Reid. He was taken to our home dimension.’

‘Why the hell would someone kidnap Reid and send him into an alternate dimension?’

‘Not just an alternate dimension,’ Garcia corrected. ‘Their _home_ dimension. It kinda seems like there’s a little more to it than just wanting to make him tea and biscuits.’

‘We took your friend, because we were certain that he could close the portal.’

‘I’m sorry, _you_ took Reid?’ Morgan demanded, overcome with a sudden onslaught of fury that JJ knew would be present in all of them. ‘What the fuck?’

‘It had become clear that we were mistaken. While he has the mental capability, his mind lacks focus.’

JJ bit her lip, trying not to let herself say something that would get them all blown to pieces. ‘You want to send us there to snap him out of it.’

‘That is our hope. With the portal closed, they will be unable to survive here. You call me the Goddess of Healing – let me heal your world.’

‘You really want us to trust you?’ Morgan asked. ‘Why can’t you just do it yourself?’

‘I don’t think we have a choice about this, Morgan,’ JJ said. She looked Sekhmet in the eye, trying not to flinch. ‘You can’t go back, can you?’

‘I – and any of my kind – will die, if I return. Our world cannot sustain us.’

‘So you come and destroy ours instead,’ Emily said, scornfully. ‘Nice.’

‘Do this, and your friend will be freed.’ Sekhmet wasn’t talking about Reid; she was talking about Seaver. That, more than anything else, was the argument that swayed them. After all, rescuing Seaver was half the reason they’d chosen to summon Sekhmet in the first place.

‘Fine,’ Hotch said, evenly. ‘You have a deal.’

Sekhmet ignored the malice that was directed towards her. With nothing more than a steely glance towards a particular spot on the ground, a rectangle of pure darkness appeared. An abyss that stared back into her soul.

‘Who wants to go first?’ Rossi said, jovially.

There was a beat of silence.

‘I will,’ Morgan said, resolute in his convictions. He might not have been happy about the situation, but he was sure as hell stubborn enough to take the lead. He grabbed his backpack and rearranged it on his shoulders before stepping through the portal.

There were no unearthly screams to suggest he might have been eaten by some prehistoric monster.

With a half shrug, Emily followed him.

As JJ stepped forward, and explosion shook the air. Smoke and dust filled the air, and she couldn’t breathe, let alone see.

‘What happened?’ she called out.

‘Go!’ Hotch’s voice yelled. He was right behind her. JJ tripped, and fell forward, only then she wasn’t falling.

She was flying. That’s what it felt like. The pathway between dimensions. Some impossibly small yet impossibly infinite gateway to what might well have been another universe.

When she landed, it was with a heavy thud. Pain shot through her body.

‘Ugh!’

There was grass.

Grass, and rocks, and dirt.

Not what she would have expected from an alternate dimension. She wondered if Hotch had seen this.

 _Hotch!_

‘No!’ JJ stood, suddenly, hoping like hell that he’d followed her through. ‘ _Fuck_.’

‘JJ.’ Morgan was at her side in half a second, his hand on her shoulder. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. Something attacked us, I think. It…Ugh.’ Everything hurt. Her ears were ringing, and her head was throbbing, and they were _trapped_ in an alternate dimension.

 _This was_ not _how she’d envisioned spending her Friday nights._

‘You think Sekhmet double-crossed us?’ Emily asked. JJ could hear the frown in her voice.

‘I sure as hell hope not.’ She looked around desperately, hoping to find some impossible return portal, but already, she knew it was fruitless. For all intents and purposes, they were stuck until they found Reid.

The other two helped her to her feet, as she blinked away the blurriness. ‘We should have a look around to see what we’re dealing with,’ Morgan said decidedly, and neither JJ nor Emily argued.

They were in some kind of clearing, surrounded by overgrown trees. If she didn’t know better, JJ would have put her money on being somewhere in the North-eastern United States. Maybe upstate New York.

For over an hour, they slogged through the undergrowth of the forest, and every now and then, JJ caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye. Not particularly wanting to shoot anything, she kept her hand on the butt of her pistol just the same.

It would have _really_ sucked if the atmosphere had more oxygen than normal, and they all died in a horrific explosion.

‘There’s still life here,’ Morgan said, after a six-legged, furry creature crossed their path. ‘Why would they still be alive if everything had to evacuate?’

‘Maybe they evolved to survive whatever was killing the demons.’

‘Or maybe that was just an excuse to go to war,’ Morgan said.

‘Just because they turned our world into an apocalyptic wasteland doesn’t mean they were specifically out to get us,’ Emily said drily.

‘Guys, I think the trees are thinning out up ahead,’ JJ interjected, trying to avoid the argument that kept popping up and had no clear answer.

A heavy silence hung in the air as they pushed through; as if whatever lay at the end of their path was due some kind of reverence.

When they finally stepped through, Morgan was the first person to speak.

‘Holy shit,’ he said, which, in JJ’s opinion, summed it up pretty damn well. They were on the edge of a cliff that stretched on for miles, but it was the canyon below that caught their attention.

An immense city, echoing with silence. Trees and vines and other forms of fauna had wended its way through. Nature’s skyscrapers.

‘If Reid’s anywhere, he’ll be in there,’ JJ said. ‘We brought rope, right?’

The journey down was not an easy one. A few Bureau team building sessions aside, none of them had much experience with climbing. They went down one at a time, not wanting to put more pressure on the rope than was necessary.

A grueling two hours later, they stood at the bottom of the cliff; scratched, bruised and exhausted, but alive.

‘Let me guess,’ Morgan said, digging into his pack for water. ‘Garcia, Hotch and Rossi have the food in their packs.’

‘Well there’s gotta be _something_ edible around here,’ JJ commented, taking a swig from her own bottle. ‘We’ll have a look around.’

They wandered through the city, every so often calling out Reid’s name. JJ doubted they’d get a response.

‘Ghost city,’ Emily commented, as they walked through the streets. The mere fact that the place _had_ streets was surprising to JJ.

‘Y’know, I was kind of expecting a little more fire and brimstone,’ Morgan said, staring upwards at the vine-covered building to their right. Beneath the thick plant-life, faded stone was barely visible.  ‘Most houses these days aren’t built to last. People put cost above durability. These buildings…I’d say they’ve been here for a long time.’

‘Not even good construction can stop nature from taking over, though,’ JJ added. ‘What I want to know is how it deteriorated so quickly. They’ve only been in our world for what? Two years? This is centuries’ worth of attrition. Maybe more.’

‘It’s an alternate dimension. You think there could be some kind of time dilation as well?’ Morgan queried. JJ tried not to smirk. Those were certainly not words she would have expected Morgan to be saying.

‘Like Narnia,’ Emily said. ‘A few years goes by in a matter of hours. I can’t wait for the magical lion to show up.’ An expression of surprise crossed her face, followed by realization. ‘I’ve been here before,’ she murmured, running her hands along the stone wall. Without even bothering to elaborate, she ducked under the tendrils of vine that formed a canopy.

‘Wait,’ Morgan frowned. ‘Emily, wait.’ She stopped. ‘What do you mean, you’ve been here before?’

‘I’ve seen it before,’ she amended. ‘In a dream, or a nightmare, or a vision, or something. Do you have that piece of paper – from when…’ She paused. ‘From when I got possessed the second time.’

Morgan pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to her.

Emily shook her head. ‘Nothing,’ she sighed. ‘So what…now we have to find Reid? Well that shouldn’t be too hard.’

Privately, JJ agreed with the other woman’s sarcastic comment. For as far as the eye could see, there was a complex, chaotic world – probably about as complex and chaotic as their own.

They followed Emily underneath the canopy, and turned straight into what looked like some kind of park.

‘Fruit trees,’ Morgan pointed out. JJ was suddenly reminded of how hungry she was. They made their way to the park cautiously, disturbing a few congregated animals on the way.

‘If the local wildlife are eating it, then it’s probably not poisonous.’

‘If we end up dead, I’m blaming you,’ Emily deadpanned, picking one off the ground and examining it quizzically. ‘Teeth marks. Don’t they say that red is nature’s way of saying “back off”?’

‘Different dimension, different rules,’ Morgan shrugged. ‘Who wants first bite?’

‘I’ll do it,’ JJ said, taking the fruit from Emily’s hand. She broke off a small piece of the flesh, a sticky orange mess in her fingers. Hesitantly, she put a finger in her mouth, not quite willing to test more than she needed to.

‘Well?’ Morgan asked. He was looking at her as though he was afraid she’d drop dead at any second.

‘Tastes like an orange,’ she said. Tangy, and a little sweet, but the texture was probably more like a persimmon than an orange. It wasn’t the best comparison, but it was the closest she could think of. She took another bite.

‘Nothing…tingly?’ he asked. JJ raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t particularly inclined to talk about tingliness with Derek Morgan. After no discernable reaction, she ate the whole thing.

‘Well, it’s not caviar, but I think it’ll do for now.’

They made a short meal of the fruit, reasoning that they could always come back later if they could find the place.

It was another ten minutes before the nausea started. JJ dropped to her knees, suddenly hyperaware of how dizzy she felt. The trees and the buildings were melting. The sky was on fire.

‘Guys?’

‘I can’t feel my face,’ Morgan mumbled. JJ wasn’t entirely sure, but she got the feeling he was slowly turning into a banana. ‘I guess they were poisonous.’

‘It’s not poison,’ Emily said, with a laugh. JJ wasn’t sure why the hell she was laughing. ‘We’re tripping balls.’

JJ turned around, half certain she was going to vomit. Instead, she looked to the side, and blinked. The last thing she saw before her conscious mind gave out was the warped face of Spencer Reid.


	9. Chapter 9

Jennifer Jareau awoke to find herself sitting on a sofa in the middle of a jungle. She wasn’t alone.  
  
Morgan and Prentiss seemed to have disappeared entirely; instead, none other than Aaron Hotchner was sitting on the end of the sofa.  
  
He was wearing a starched suit, and his eyepatch was gone. This was the Aaron Hotchner of before the apocalypse.  
  
‘You know, JJ,’ Hotch started, his voice stoic as ever. ‘I could really go for some penguins. Bright blue penguins, covered in scales and hot sauce. Maybe with some fries on the side.’  
  
‘Penguins?’ JJ repeated, dumbfounded.  
  
‘Oh yeah. Have I never told you about my love of penguins? I guess there are some things I should go through if we’re sleeping together now.’  
  
‘Okay…’  
  
‘Great.’ He gave a wide, un-Hotchlike grin. ‘How do you feel about toes?’  
  
JJ awoke with a start – for real this time.  
  
She wasn’t in the jungle, but rather a largish stone room. There were no windows, and the only source of light came from a series of torches that had been set into the wall.  
  
Beneath what felt like a bed of woven vines, the ground was hard and uneven. Head spinning, she sat up. Apparently eating the local flora hadn’t been the best idea.  
  
‘Drink,’ said a voice that sounded strangely familiar, and yet completely different. Its owner pushed something into her hands. ‘Your body is severely dehydrated. Along with severe hallucinations and dissociation, it’s one of the more common side effects.’  
  
‘There were teeth marks,’ she said, in a voice that sounded almost like a grunt.  
  
‘The flesh is safe to eat, but the seeds are markedly less so. The native inhabitants used them to create a potent psychedelic for shamanic purposes. In eastern Siberia, after a shaman consumed the Amanita muscaria mushroom, others would drink his urine in order to achieve similar psychedelic effects, but without the negative side effects. Unfortunately I don’t think urine would have quelled the hunger pangs.’  
  
JJ opened her eyes to find Spencer Reid staring down at her. He looked the same, and yet completely different.  
  
His hair had been hacked into a broom-like shape, and his eyes were dark and sunken. Reid had always been skinny, but now, JJ was almost certain she could pick out individual bones.  
  
He’d fashioned himself something that vaguely resembled clothing; JJ was no expert on organic fibers from another dimension, but it looked a little like hemp.  
  
‘Hi,’ she said, not quite sure what words would actually be appropriate in this kind of situation. “Sorry you got kidnapped by demons in order to do their bidding, but it’s nice to see you again”?  
  
‘Hi,’ he replied, his voice far more stilted than she’d ever heard it. ‘They’re still unconscious. They probably will be for a little while longer. I believe they’re more susceptible to the effects of the hallucinogen than you are. Come have some lunch.’  
  
He led her into the next room, which seemed to be a kitchen and dining area of some variety. There was a roughly made wooden table in the center of the room, which seemed to be used for both meal preparation and eating.  
  
‘I only have one chair, but I’ve already eaten today.’ He handed her a bowl filled with something that looked like intestines. ‘Would you like a nutritional breakdown of the contents?’  
  
‘Uh…no. I’m fine, thanks.’ JJ was sure that if she actually found out what she was eating, it would make it that much more unappealing. The texture was a little strange, but it didn’t taste all that bad. A lot better than it looked, at any rate.  
  
While she ate, Reid had moved over to the wall, which JJ now realized was covered in numbers and symbols.  
  
‘Is this how you fight the demons?’ she asked, unsure as to why he’d be doing mathematics in a situation like this. Of course, it was Reid, so he did math in a lot of strange places.  
  
‘You’re not a demon,’ he said, matter-of-factly, as thought there was even the slightest possibility that the idea had been under question. ‘Neither are they, although she’s had a demon inside her mind; I can tell that much. They’re smarter than us, you know. That’s what they tell me. They give me ideas. Whispers of the greatest inventions the world has ever seen.’ Reid tapped the side of his temple. ‘Did you know that people once considered many mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and Dissociative Identity Disorder to be the result of demonic possession?’  
  
‘Are you saying you’ve got demons in your brain?’ JJ asked, incredulous. Part of her was hoping like hell for Morgan and Prentiss to wake up, because it was entirely possible that years of solitude had sent Spencer Reid insane.  
  
Reid didn’t answer straight away, instead scratching out a set of equations on one wall, only to replace them with a whole new set. ‘Numbers, and theories and ideas. A key to unlock the universe. There.’ He pointed to a corner of the room, where a strange object that looked almost like a high-tech mirror sat. ‘My dimensional portal. Not quite finished. A few temporal issues. Might well send you back to the big bang, or the Mesozoic era. I wanted to build a time machine as well, but the paradoxes…’ He gave a laugh that was uncharacteristically maniacal. ‘Oh, the paradoxes. The greatest mystery the world has ever seen, wrapped into an incomprehensible ball of the laws of reality itself. Srinivasa Ramanujan looked at mathematics from an entirely different perspective than as taught in the western world, independently compiling and calculating almost 3900 identities, equations and theorems, including both the Bernoulli numbers and Euler’s constant at fifteen decimal places before he was seventeen. The mere fact that he could achieve such amazing things says a lot about the universalizability of knowledge and the concept of truth and beauty in physics and mathematics.’  
  
He scratched out some more numbers.  
  
‘So I started again. An entire history of mathematical knowledge from the beginning. Of course, throwing out my preconceived notions was a big problem, but the demons helped with that.’  
  
‘Reid…’ JJ’s voice was soft, and, though she didn’t quite want to admit it, afraid. ‘Spence.’ He started at the sound of that name, as though it was familiar to him. Good. ‘Spence, how long have you been here?’  
  
On the other side, it had been less than a month. JJ didn’t know how the time dilation worked, but she could tell that it had definitely been more than a month.  
  
‘Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.’ He grinned, as though expecting she should be thoroughly amused by his joke. ‘I lost track…somewhere along the line. There’s a number, and I should remember it, but I can’t…I…Years? Decades? Centuries? The mind changes, but the body stays the same. Or at least a little bit the same. I think if my mother saw me, she’d try to fatten me up a little.’  
  
JJ let herself relax just the slightest bit. If he remembered his mother, that was good. He still had some form of mental connection to the real world. ‘Do you…’ She gulped. ‘Do you know who I am?’  
  
‘Jennifer Amanda Jareau, born August 17th 1978, East Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Afraid of the woods, used to collect butterflies, favorite football team is the Washington Redskins. Graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and later from Georgetown. Fiancé, William LaMontagne Junior, Son, Henry LaMontagne, both deceased.’ He faltered slightly. JJ tried to bite back the nausea that came up at the mention of Henry and Will.  
  
‘JJ?’ he whispered. For the first time since she’d awoken, his voice was filled with something akin to fear. Afraid of what, JJ wasn’t sure. Maybe he thought that it was all in his head. If the thought was terrifying to her, it would have been much more so to Reid, who had a much greater sensitivity to the issues surrounding mental illness.  
  
‘It’s me, Spence,’ she replied, unprepared for the sudden, tight hug that he wrapped her in. Reid had never been all that big on touch, but she could imagine that years of isolation might acquiesce that somewhat.  
  
‘It’s been so long,’ he said. The words came out as a whimper – not an accusatory one, but then, JJ couldn’t help but hear it as accusatory anyway. Whatever they’d been through was nothing compared to Reid’s plight. ‘I wasn’t sure…I wasn’t sure if my memories were real, or made up.’  
  
‘They’re real,’ JJ assured him, as she pulled away. ‘The BAU, the end of the world…All of it happened.’  
  
Reid nodded. ‘Of course, using a solipsist argument, the entire universe could well be the product of my mind, but I don’t think that’s likely.’  
  
‘No?’ JJ raised an eyebrow.  
  
‘No, there are many arguments against the idea of solipsism in a purely epistemological form. For example—’ He stopped midway through his sentence, eyes darting towards the doorway to the other room.  
  
JJ turned quickly. Her hand started to edge towards her gun, stopping when she realized what Reid was staring at.  
  
‘Reid?’ Morgan sounded incredulous, as though after all they’d been through, he hadn’t actually expected to find the other man. Markedly less surprised, Emily reholstered her weapon and rushed over to embrace him without even a second thought. Not half a second later, Morgan followed suit.  
  
‘It’s good to see you, man,’ Morgan grinned, patting Reid on the back.  
  
‘It’s good to see you, too.’ Reid gave a small smile. For the first time, JJ was starting to feel like maybe they’d make it back alright.  
  
…  
  
Reid refused to take them to the portal.  
  
That was a hurdle that they hadn’t anticipated, and it left Morgan reeling with anger. It wasn’t that he blamed Reid. It wasn’t his fault – not really. He was angry at Sekhmet, for putting them in this position.  
  
‘Well, she did say he “lacked focus,”’ JJ commented, picking at the meal they’d put together from Reid’s food storage. Considering what happened the last time they’d eaten, Morgan didn’t need to guess why she wasn’t enthused.  
  
‘So what, does she want us to just give him a pep talk, as if that’ll erase whatever’s happened to him over however long he’s been here?’  
  
‘I don’t know about you, but I’m not much of a motivational speaker,’ JJ shrugged.  
  
‘Whatever happened to the kickass communications liaison that could convince the media to turn around and go home?’  
  
‘The world turned to hell, Derek,’ JJ said sharply. ‘That woman has been dead for a long time.’  
  
‘Well as nice as it might seem to let our guns do the talking, I don’t think that’ll really help in this case.’ Emily’s voice was dark, and for a moment, Morgan wondered how things had gotten to the point where they were seriously considering using this kind of force to solve their problems.  
  
Reid was in the other room, working on…well, working on whatever the hell he was working on. He’d eaten breakfast briefly, but judging by the way the other man’s bones seemed to poke out a little more than usual, Morgan was entirely certain that he ate only enough to keep himself alive.  
  
‘Give it time,’ Emily said with a shrug. ‘He’ll come around.’  
  
‘We don’t have time,’ JJ snapped. ‘For all we know, everyone else is dead. We need to get back there, and help them.’  
  
‘You think I don’t know that?’ Emily countered, angrily. ‘I’m not trying to be obtuse, JJ, I just don’t think it’s going to help if we push him. He’s not exactly in the strongest state of mind right now.’  
  
‘Stop it,’ Morgan interrupted. ‘Arguing isn’t exactly going to help the situation here, either.’  
  
JJ gave him a curious look. ‘When did you become the peacemaker?’  
  
He gave a slight shrug. ‘Come on. Let’s go see what the genius is working on.’  
  
In the morning light, they could see exactly what Reid was working on. All four of the walls in the next room were covered with scribbles and notations. He’d seen them yesterday, but now they seemed so much more prominent. Maybe the whole damn building was like this – like some enormous whiteboard.  
  
‘What are you working on?’ Morgan asked, half-afraid of what the answer was going to be.  
  
‘Everything,’ Reid answered. ‘Physics, math, demonic symbols, the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I’m also translating the world’s funniest joke into German, but I can only do it one word at a time.’ He smiled widely, and Morgan wasn’t quite sure whether he should reciprocate or not.  
  
He settled on a slight chuckle.  
  
Satisfied, Reid continued. ‘Many scientists consider 1666 and 1905 to be “anni mirabiles,” or “wonderful years.” During his isolation for the duration of the bubonic plague, Isaac Newton invented differential and integral calculus, devised the universal theory of gravitation, and produced an explanation from the spectral nature of sunlight.  Albert Einstein produced four significant papers on Brownian motion, the Photoelectric effect, Special relativity, and matter and energy equivalence, all of which played a significant part in laying the foundations for modern physics. Both men were in their mid-twenties.’ His eyes lit up brightly, and Morgan could see the madness in them. It was almost frightening. ‘If two of the greatest minds of our time could do that in one year, imagine what I could do in ten.’  
  
‘Wait, you can read their language?’ Emily asked, digging in her pocket. She passed over the piece of paper on which she’d scribbled those unreadable symbols.  
  
‘Certainly,’ Reid said, taking the piece of paper from her. His eyes scanned the page. ‘It’s a passage from their Scripture.’   
  
‘They have Scripture?’  
  
‘Most cultures throughout history have created mythologies, or origin stories – more often than not as the result of some search for meaning. Really, though, I think the universe is interesting enough without creating metaphors for its wonders.’  
  
‘What does it say?’  
  
‘“The dead shall walk among us, and the skies will turn to darkness, and we will vanish from this world. Locked away from the Carithnon for all eternity.”’  
  
‘“Carithnon?”’  
  
‘It seems to be the accepted demonym for their species.’  He cracked a small smile at the unintentional pun.  
  
‘You know a lot about them,’ JJ commented, and Reid gave a small shrug.   
  
‘Once I figured out the symbols, the rest was mostly dialects. Realistically, though, I’ve read less than 0.01% of their recorded history.’  
  
‘That’s a lot of history,’ Emily mused. ‘Seems strange to think that there’s literally an entirely separate world that’s just as complex and interwoven as ours.’  
  
‘So why leave it all behind?’   
  
‘Because their scripture told them to? Like some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy thing?’  
  
‘I don’t think so,’ Reid said, matter-of-factly. ‘As near as I can tell, their habitat was no longer able to sustain them. Like…imagine a fire.’ He frowned. ‘No. That’s not a good analogy. Imagine a fish. It swims along happily in its own environment. Then, the oceans suddenly turn to acid, so the fish is forced to created an interdimensional portal. The fish that are already in the other dimension don’t like intruders; they’re afraid of things they don’t understand, so they kill the new fish. But some of the new fish decide that this should be their home, so they slaughter the old fish at will. If we close the portal off, the new fish will die, but what right do we have to say whether they live or die?’  
  
‘Reid, they destroyed our home. Millions of people are dead. Billions, maybe. We don’t do anything, and our world will be dead, too.’  
  
‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ Reid murmured, but Morgan could tell that he wasn’t entirely convinced by his own words.  
  
‘Nobody’s asking you to play God,’ JJ said, perhaps a little more harshly than she would have two years ago, but Morgan wasn’t going to judge. ‘They would have died here if they hadn’t jumped over?’  
  
‘Almost certainly.’  
  
‘Then you’re not playing God. You’re putting things back into balance. You want to change the world, but you can’t do that from here,’ JJ told him gently. ‘What good is a wonder year if there’s nobody around to reap the benefits? Isn’t that what science is supposed to be about?’  
  
‘“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things - from subnuclear particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole. Our intuition is by no means an infallible guide. Our perceptions may be distorted by training and prejudice or merely because of the limitations of our sense organs, which, of course, perceive directly but a small fraction of the phenomena of the world. Even so straightforward a question as whether in the absence of friction a pound of lead falls faster than a gram of fluff was answered incorrectly by Aristotle and almost everyone else before the time of Galileo. Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is.”’  
  
Reid paused.  
  
‘Sagan, 1974. Broca’s Brain. Page 15. A grain of salt is literally too complex for the human mind to understand in full detail. How can we ever possibly hope to understand the universe in all of its complexities? And that’s without taking alternate dimensions into account. There are voices in my head, and I don’t know if I want them to stop.’  
  
Morgan shared a skeptical look with JJ, but it was Emily that spoke up.  
  
‘They don’t stop,’ she whispered. ‘Even after they’re long gone, their ghosts are still in my mind, haunting every thought.’ Her voice took on an angry tone, and Morgan would have to be dumb, deaf and blind to miss the tears in her eyes. ‘No matter how far you run, or how well you hide, they will always be there. Every waking second, every dream, every nightmare. At least…if we kill the others, then the ghosts are the only thing I’ll have to deal with.’  
  
‘You never mentioned that,’ Morgan said, feeling a little betrayed that she didn’t feel she could confide in him.  
  
‘Well, there were more important things to deal with.’  
  
There was a long, almost awkward silence, but Morgan was sure that he could see some kind of decision forming in Reid’s eyes.  
  
‘It’s getting late,’ he said, with a harshness that wasn’t like him. Morgan wondered if the demons in his head could take control. ‘We can discuss this later. You should get some rest.’  
  
Morgan didn’t bother pointing out that they’d pretty much slept most of the day anyway. He knew Reid well enough to remember that the other man could be surreptitiously stubborn. So he returned to his makeshift bed, satisfied in the thought that an answer would come in the morning.  
  
Only it didn’t.  
  
“Later,” in Reid’s mind, seemed to mean days later. They’d explored the area surrounding his hideout, but it became quickly clear that he’d set up his home a long way from wherever the portal was. He had provided them with a translation key for their language – several hundred pages of symbols with scribbled notes beside each one. Morgan had quite happily handed it over to Emily, who seemed better suited to the task of translating ancient languages.  
  
‘There’s a big difference between Arabic and Demonic,’ Emily told him.  
  
‘Actually, they’re remarkably similar,’ Reid told her, not looking away from the wall that he was currently writing on. ‘It begs the question of whether or not there was some shared history between the worlds – perhaps a catastrophic event that resulted in a dimensional tear. The science isn’t particularly sound, but that may be because this is a world of magic. I’m still attempting to determine how the rules work.’  
  
That was the first two days.  
  
On the third day, he acquiesced.  
  
Morgan wasn’t quite willing to call it “giving in,” because he didn’t fold, or break down, or surrender. He simply packed a bag, and said, ‘We’re leaving now,’ as though they had absolutely no argument in the matter.  
  
Which, really, they didn’t. Their ability to save the world was contingent on Reid’s willingness to help them do so.  
  
‘How are we supposed to destroy it, anyway?’ Emily asked, as they walked through the overgrown streets of the city. ‘I can’t imagine that it has a self-destruct button.’  
  
‘I made demolition charges before my mind was consumed by other things,’ Reid told her. ‘They’re in my bag.’  
  
‘You’re just walking around with homemade explosives in your bag?’ Morgan asked, suddenly skeptical of the idea of making it out alive.  
  
‘Derek, I have an IQ of 187 and several hyper-intelligent demonic beings living inside my head. The charges are safe. They have a remote detonator.’  
  
It took about thirty seconds for the reality of those words to sink in. ‘Reid. When you say remote detonator, you don’t mean the kind of remote detonator that’ll work interdimensionally, do you?’  
  
‘Not at all. The remote needs to be triggered from this side.’  
  
They stopped.  
  
‘What are you saying?’ JJ demanded. ‘That someone has to stay behind to set them off? Can’t you set them on a timer?’  
  
‘While it is technically possible, I believe that it’s advisable to use the remote detonation option in order to ensure total destruction.’  
  
‘I’ll stay,’ said three voices at almost exactly the same time, and Morgan was not surprised in the least.  
  
‘Listen,’ he said, before either of them could make their arguments. ‘I don’t have anyone left back there. My family’s dead. I won’t be leaving anyone behind.’  
  
‘Except Garcia. And Rossi. And the rest of us,’ Emily reminded him. ‘Besides. You’re not the only one that doesn’t have anyone left.’  
  
‘We can argue about who gets to make the mortal sacrifice later,’ said JJ, in the kind of voice that made it pretty damn clear she would argue the point to the last. Morgan was sure that they all would. Hell, if Reid wasn’t so addled by all the crap he’d been through, he’d probably be arguing about it, too.  
  
They kept walking.  
  
Four hours later, the sun was high in the sky; it felt like a normal day back home, except maybe a little more humid. The overgrown buildings grew smaller and more sparse, until they were out of the main city area. Ahead was a vast plain. For miles and miles; nothing.  
  
‘Are you sure you know where to go?’  
  
Reid didn’t even grace the question with an answer. Instead, he pointed at a peak in the far distance.  
  
‘Why so far away?’ Emily asked. ‘It seems a little strange for them to build the machine that’s supposed to save their lives in such a remote location.’  
  
‘Radiation,’ Reid explained. ‘We’re probably being bombarded by particles even as we speak.’  
  
‘Oh. That’s nice to know.’  
  
They kept walking.  
  
It took a little less than a day of walking to reach the base of the mountain. At night, they lit a fire and took turns keeping watch. Morgan shot a six-legged, fur covered beast that got a little too close for comfort, and it ended up as the following morning’s breakfast. He missed bacon.  
  
Two hours in, they turned a corner and suddenly, it was right in front of them. Carved into the very surface of the mountain, an enormous, swirling portal. It seemed to be every single color at once, and yet none at all. It absorbed light, and yet reflected it. It was like nothing that Derek Morgan had ever seen in his lifetime.  
  
‘So that’s what’s keeping them alive, huh?’ Emily asked, voice more than a little bit awed. ‘Shit.’  
  
‘So how are we going to work this out?’ Morgan asked. ‘’cos I’m pretty sure that if we start arguing about it, the world’s gonna be completely destroyed before we get an answer. As the ranking member of the team, I nominate myself to stay behind.’  
  
He didn’t miss the looks of disgust that both Emily and JJ shot in his direction.  
  
‘Seriously?’ Emily asked. ‘Seriously? The Bureau’s been dead and gone for two years, and you want to go and fucking pull rank? I don’t know if that’s chauvinistic or just plain stupid, but it’s not going to work.’  
  
‘So what do you suggest?’  
  
‘Here’s an idea,’ said JJ. ‘Draw straws. No arguments. No second guessing. One pick, and it’s over.’  
  
‘Fine,’ Morgan said, though he was absolutely not fine with it. One in three was better odds than he might’ve gotten otherwise. ‘But Reid holds the straws.’  
  
Reid, who had until that point been fixated on the portal, turned at the sound of his name. ‘Drawing straws? Would you like to know the statistical probability of—’  
  
‘No,’ Emily interjected, before he could say anything further. Reid looked slightly crestfallen, but went in search of sticks that he could use to complete the task.  
  
The length of each stick disguised, Reid instructed them to close their eyes while they picked. Morgan reached out, and took the first stick that he touched, hoping beyond all hope that it was the right one.  
  
It wasn’t.  
  
Stomach sinking in his heart, he looked towards the others in askance.  
  
 Emily gave a slight shake of her head, showing him her stick. It was the same length as his. Which meant…  
  
‘Well I guess that’s settled, then,’ JJ said, a grim smile on her face. She flashed her stick – the shortest stick – at them briefly, before tossing it to the ground. ‘Reid, how do I blow this thing up?’


	10. Chapter 10

JJ waited behind in the clearing with Reid while Emily and Morgan placed the charges around the portal. Part of her was grateful for it, because she didn't need them looking at her like she was a dead woman walking.

Reid, at least, seemed unperturbed by her dilemma, but the fact that that was only because he was insane from years of solitude didn't really comfort her much. While he seemed comfortable in the silence, JJ had questions she needed to ask him.

'We're doing this to kill the demons on the other side – will the fact that I'm stuck in the wrong dimension mean it'll have the same effect?'

He didn't answer straight away, instead, his eyes locked onto a small flying insect. It looked like a cross between a dragonfly and a butterfly, with an added ethereal glow. 'I don't know,' he admitted eventually, sounding somewhat annoyed. He probably didn't like the fact that the words "I don't know," had to be in his vocabulary. 'It seems logical, but without empirical evidence, there's no saying what will happen.'

'There's no empirical evidence that they'll die either, though.'

'True,' he said. 'Though there are some references to the possibility that it has happened before.'

JJ nodded, but really, she didn't care all that much. All she cared about was the slowly dawning realization that she was going to die. Alone.

And part of her didn't even seem to mind.

Over the years, JJ had never been particularly religious. She wasn't sure what she believed in, but her issues with faith had never really been as prominent as Morgan's or Rossi's or Emily's. Then, the world ended, and Will and Henry died. The only way she could keep going was to let herself hope that they were somewhere better. And that maybe one day, she'd join them.

She wasn't sure if she _believed_ it, but just that hope had gotten her through the last few months.

Now, when death seemed so certain, she thought of them, their pictures still fresh in her mind. Them, and Hotch.

She wasn't sure if he'd survived whatever attack had interrupted their summoning, but if he did, then she would never see him again. Maybe "love" wasn't the right way to describe how she felt about him. She liked him _a lot_ , but their relationship had only progressed to that point just days ago. "It's complicated" was probably better, but even that seemed inadequate. After all, the circumstances weren't exactly normal. She couldn't expect that he would mourn her the same way he did Haley.

'When you see Hotch, tell him…' She paused. There was nothing she could say that could really explain what she needed to explain. 'Just tell him I'm sorry. I think he already knows the rest.'

'It might take weeks,' Reid said, and it might have sounded non-sequitur to anyone listening in, but JJ was starting to get used to his fractured style of conversation. 'Maybe even years. Sekhmet suggested that a human might last here longer than a demon could on the other side. If taking a chance is preferable, it runs on solar power, and it self destructs after a single use. As for the issues…well, let's just say I hope you like the possibility of dinosaurs. But you can't save them _._ '

JJ frowned.

Okay, _that_ , she had no clue what he was talking about. Before she could ask, though, Morgan and Prentiss had returned to their camp, both looking more forlorn that JJ had seen them in a long time.

It seemed almost amusing to think that they were upset that they _couldn't_ be the martyrs, but then she realized just how broken they must have been if that was preferable to returning home.

She could have offered to let them stay with her, but they wouldn't: at the very least, they were all committed to making sure that Reid made it back unscathed. Even if the plan didn't work, then at the very least, she wasn't making an empty sacrifice.

'I think we're ready,' Morgan announced, ten minutes later. They'd placed the charges according to some algorithm that Reid had worked out – enough coverage that it would destroy the portal irreparably, but not so much that it would trigger a landslide.

'Good luck,' JJ told him sincerely; they had absolutely no idea what it would be like on the other side. The portal could lead straight into demon territory, or into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or any other number of dangerous or otherwise inhospitable places.

Once upon a time, she might have given him a hug goodbye, but she was so sure that if she did that today, then she'd break down.

_Hold it all in._

Instead, she shook his hand, as though they were conducting some kind of business meeting. It was stilted, and a little impersonal, and when Morgan pulled her into a hug anyway, she didn't object.

The tears were starting to well, but she bit them back.

'We'll try to find a way…' Emily said, words trailing off at the end of the sentence. 'Sekhmet might be able to do something, or there might be a spell, or…Something. Stay strong.'

'I'll compartmentalize,' JJ said with a laugh. Emily smiled, but it was a sad, distant sort of smile. The smile you gave someone that was about to die.

They were gone surprisingly quickly.

They stepped through the portal, causing a shimmering haze to ripple across the area. Just like that, it was as though she was the only person left in the universe.

 _This_ universe, at least.

 _Dimension_ , she corrected, mentally, even though she still didn't quite understand the difference. Reid had explained it a few times, but his explanations generally involved high level math and physics, so she'd zoned out on it a little.

Remote in hand, JJ grabbed her backpack, and started heading off down the mountain. She decided that she'd set the charges off when she was halfway down – far enough away that she wouldn't get hit by the blast, but close enough to walk back up if something went wrong.

Really, there was nothing stopping her from walking straight through that portal, and rejoining the rest of the team. Nothing, except for the millions of lives at stake, and the weight of her conscience on her soul.

An hour later, she knew she'd gone far enough. She couldn't see the portal anymore, but there was no way she'd miss the explosion; a dozen finely tuned charges set to go off at the flip of a switch.

She pulled the remote from her pocket, and took off the plastic casing. Where the hell Reid had found plastic in this place, she had no idea. Apparently he'd been able to find electronic components as well, so maybe plastic wasn't all that farfetched.

 _Or, he could have brought it with him_.

She didn't deliberate on the matter much further. Her thumb hovered over the single red button, aware that she one single touch was all it would take to change the entire course of humanity's future.

No pressure.

Not only that, but it would trap her here for the rest of her life. Weeks, maybe even years. She wasn't sure if she could live that life.

She was a Communications Liaison. She needed to _communicate_. She couldn't hole away, and write equations all day like Reid did. Being in this place for any length of time would send her insane in a completely different way.

Reid had lasted years, but JJ doubted she'd even be able to go months before she started clawing her eyes out. Hopefully, it wouldn't get that far.

JJ pressed the button before she could change her mind, and the force of it knocked her to her knees. Not the explosion – that was big, but she was far enough away to avoid the shockwave. The sudden disconnect she'd felt was like being whacked in the face with a sledgehammer. Like someone had pulled her power cable, any connection she might have had to her home, her family, her friends.

Gone.

She tried to breathe through it.

In. Out. In. Out.

Calm, deep breaths.

Darkness clawed at the edges of her vision, and JJ had the sudden realization that she was losing consciousness.

'Seconds,' she murmured, hands clawing at the dirt. 'I guess that's close enough to weeks.' If it was affecting _her_ this quickly, then she hoped like hell, it was slaughtering those fucking asshole demons on the other side.

In. Out. In. Out.

Weakly, she looked out over the plains encompassed the world ahead of her, golden sun just starting to dip beneath the horizon, sky tinted a brilliant shade of pink.

Not bad, for the last thing she'd ever see.

JJ closed her eyes.

Whatever else had happened, for the first time in a long time, she felt at peace.

…

Morgan hit the ground with a grunt and a thud, jarring his bad knee. His head was spinning, and he was positive that he was going to throw up.

Once he'd reoriented himself, he took a few moments to assess the situation. They'd made it through the portal – that was good. No demons around – also good. He had absolutely no idea where they were – not so good.

There was snow on the ground, which narrowed it down a little. That was, of course, assuming that it was still October. For all he knew, their few days in an alternate dimension translated to fifty-thousand years on this side.

About six feet to his left, Emily was on her hands and knees, retching into the snow. Ten feet to his right, Reid was lying face down, not moving.

'You okay?' he called out to Emily, as he ran towards Reid.

'I think my stomach had a trip through a blender,' she groaned. He heard another retch, followed by coughing, but his eyes were on Reid. His body was still, and deathly pale.

'Reid! Morgan turned Reid over quickly, fingers going straight to the other man's neck. The pulse was weak, but it was there. 'Am I alive?' the younger man asked, before opening his eyes, and looking around furtively.

'Yeah, you're alive,' Morgan grinned. 'The universe'll have to try a little harder than that to kill you.'

'We need to get him someplace warm,' Emily said, at which point Morgan realized she was standing right behind him. Her face was haggard, and she was shivering like crazy, and Morgan figured he probably looked just as bad.

'We should wait,' he said, gesturing back towards the portal. It had hurt like a knife to the gut to leave JJ behind – he at least needed to see that it had all been for something.

'Morgan, if we stick around, we're gonna freeze to death,' Emily argued, and Morgan didn't disagree. Having grown up in Chicago, he considered himself used to the cold, but that didn't really factor in being stuck in the snow while wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

They had extra clothes in their backpacks, but not nearly the kind of coverage needed for this kind of exposure. Still, they took a few minutes to layer up. Somehow, Reid managed to get the bulk of the clothes, since his natural fiber fashion extravaganza was far less suited to the cold, and he wasn't in any position to argue otherwise. Both Morgan and Emily had sleeping bags in their packs, but there wasn't exactly any practical way of using them without encumbering them even more than they were already.

'I can't decide whether I'd prefer frostbite or hypothermia,' Emily said with a laugh, as she slipped a sock over her right hand. Since there weren't quite enough to go around properly, they'd negotiated to one hand sock each.

'Frankly, neither are particularly pleasant situations to be caught in,' Reid said matter-of-factly. Morgan might have taken his words a little more seriously if he didn't look so goddamn ridiculous in their impromptu winter get-up. 'It's important to keep your extremities warm, as your body focuses on increasing blood-flow to the vital inner organs. In absence of gloves, armpits provide the most effective substitute.'

'Good to know,' Emily said, sticking her left hand under her armpit. 'I don't think walking like this is going to work very well. I might just stick with my pocket.'

Before he could reply, a loud humming noise began to emanate from the portal. The surface of it began to glow, and Morgan got the idea that getting the hell out of there was probably a good idea. Without any preamble, he grabbed Reid and Emily, and pulled them away from the portal.

They made it less than fifty feet before the shockwave pulsed outwards, knocking them to the ground.

'I guess JJ—' Morgan started, before he was interrupted by a loud, agonizing scream from Reid, who was laying on top of him. 'Reid!'

Morgan turned awkwardly, trying to get to his friend without pushing him back into the snow. Emily intervened, pulling Reid to his feet, and wrapping her arms around him. He wasn't screaming anymore, but he was whimpering lightly.

'Hey,' she murmured softly, rubbing a hand across his back. Morgan pulled himself up.'Hey, it's okay. You knew this was going to happen, remember? Cutting off the link means killing all the demons. Even the ones in your head. Shit,' she added, which seemed non-sequitur, until he noticed that her nose was bleeding.

'You want me to take him?'

'Together,' Emily said, slinging Reid's right arm around her shoulder. Morgan took his left, and they hobbled forward slowly. The last thing they needed was to lose each other.

Reid's murmurs grew increasingly incoherent, not particularly helped by the rising wind. Tiny flakes of white started to swirl around them, decreasing visibility.

'Any idea where we are?' he asked Emily.

'Kinda reminds me of Lappland,' she called back. Morgan was almost about to retort that he didn't think they were in Sweden, but really, there was nothing that really precluded that possibility. The demon infestation had started in North America, but they didn't really have any evidence to confirm that the portal only went to one place – since there was no receiving portal, it could well have just been random.

Maybe they'd probably be able to narrow it down based on astronomical data or geographic landmarks, but hopefully they'd make it to some kind of civilization before they needed to.

'Do you still have your compass with you?' Morgan asked.

'What good is it, if we don't know where we are?' Emily shot back. She bit back a sigh. 'Are we sure this isn't some _other_ dimension?' There was a pause. That was a thought that Morgan hadn't considered, and quite frankly, it was nothing short of terrifying. If it was a another dimension, then they might as well start digging their graves. 'Like some kind of multi-verse thing?'

'That applies to infinite universes, not infinite dimensions,' Reid provided, the opportunity for imparting scientific education on them apparently enough to momentarily pull him from his stupor. 'I haven't been able to complete the calculations, but I'm confident of the fact that there is only a single alternate dimension in this context.'

'"In this context?"' Morgan asked, skeptical.

'Do you really want to get him started on String Theory _now_?' Emily interjected, before Reid could respond. 'Come on. We need to get moving.' The wind was starting to pick up; if they didn't find some kind of shelter soon, then they'd be corpses.

'There's gotta be something close by,' Morgan said, trying to forget all the statistics Reid had ever told him about people dying out in the middle of nowhere.

'Comparing developed areas of the world to non-developed, statistically speaking—'

' _Never_ tell me the odds,' Emily cut in.

'Hey, now. If any of us is gonna be Han Solo, it's gonna be me. You can be Leia.'

'Oh, gee, thanks,' Emily laughed, shivering. 'It's because of the metal bikini, isn't it? Wouldn't last very long out here wearing that.'

'Actually, in the movies, Leia is consistently the most accurate with a blaster, and in the Extended Universe, she goes on to become a fairly powerful Jedi. You shouldn't take it as an insult.'

In spite of the morale boost it provided, soon, talking became far too exhausting. They trudged through the snow, the cold striking right through to the bone. Morgan's left hand was starting to blister, so he swapped the sock over. He tried to keep up an optimistic façade, but it was becoming increasingly apparent that they weren't going to last much longer.

'I'm starting to get the feeling we might have been better off staying with JJ,' Emily said, now shivering so hard that her words came through stuttered.

'I hear you,' Morgan said, teeth gritted hard to stop the chattering. Then, he saw it.

His vision impaired by snow, and cold, and fatigue, he couldn't be sure that it wasn't a hallucination. Then, both Emily and Reid perked up, and he knew it was real.

Shelter.

It wasn't exactly a rescue call, but it was as good as they were going to get.

…

The journey that had taken twelve hours on the way there, took almost two days on the way back.

Of course, part of that was the fact that any energy JJ might have had was slowly slipping away. She'd lost consciousness on the mountain – it had only felt like minutes, but realistically, it could have been hours.

The sky was growing darker, and somehow she knew that it was a side effect of shutting down that portal. This world was dying, and JJ had the sickening feeling that she was going to die along with it.

Her only vestige of hope lay with the sanctuary that Reid had built up in his time here. With that, at least, she might be able to last a few days.

There was something else that kept nagging at the back of her mind, but she wasn't sure what. It was something important…something…

The explosion had addled her mind more than she was willing to admit. Thoughts, and memories, and dreams ran together like swirling colors, each individual construct unable to be separated from the rest.

Miraculously, all of her weapons were still in working order. After the hunger set in, she steeled herself, and went on the hunt. While the sport had been fairly popular in her hometown, JJ had been something of a pacifist growing up. After her sister's death, her father had tried to include her in the hunting trips that he took her brothers on, but by that stage, JJ was more interested in boys and soccer than hanging out with her dad.

The little girl from East Allegheny was dead and gone. Jennifer Jareau, demon hunter, had replaced her.

Of course, now it was more like, "Jennifer Jareau, wildebeest hunter," but dinner was a little more important than her pride. The fire she started to cook the beast served as some kind of protection against any other creatures that might have the inclination to attack, but JJ knew that she would not sleep regardless. She was simultaneously wired and exhausted, and no amount of counting sheep was going to alleviate that balance.

At dawn, she moved on.

It felt like dawn, at least, but the sky remained dark, and would probably continue that way. There was probably some philosophical quandary, like, "if the sun doesn't rise, can you still call it dawn?" but JJ was in no mood to philosophize.

Though her body felt like it had broken down entirely, she kept moving. She _had_ to make it back to Reid's base camp, even if she didn't know why.

When she finally got there, she promptly passed out on the woven mattress, and slept for what felt like an eternity. When she woke, her mind felt a little clearer, but still unfocused.

After all, what the hell was she supposed to do?

Live out her life in a world completely devoid of human life?

Take the quick exit?

No. JJ swore that she would never do that. She would never hurt the ones she loved that way. But then, there was no one left to care.

It was a macabre thought, but that didn't make it any less true.

She decided to give herself a week. A week of pondering the matter, of deciding what, if anything, could be done.

The shadow of some forgotten memory still haunted her, a ghost stuck on the tip of her tongue. It was right there, and yet it refused to materialize. Something Reid had said…?

She thought back to the day on the mountainside. It seemed forever ago, but it was only a couple of days.

_If taking a chance is preferable, it runs on solar power, and it self destructs after a single use. As for the issues…well, let's just say I hope you like the possibility of dinosaurs. But you can't save them._

What did he _mean_ by that?

 _What_ runs on solar power?

When it came, it wasn't a creeping realization. It was something that hit her with the force of a thousand sledgehammers. The machine in the corner of the room. The one he'd pointed out on her first day here.

_My dimensional portal. Not quite finished. A few temporal issues. Might well send you back to the big bang, or the Mesozoic era._

_That_ was why he never destroyed the portal. Because he was too busy trying to find a way back. He'd gotten distracted by other things, but still…

_He built another portal._

_A flawed portal, but a portal just the same._

Just like that, a sliver of hope appeared.

Maybe she'd be going home after all.


	11. Chapter 11

The house had been abandoned a long time ago, that much was clear. Three or four years, at least, according to Morgan's estimates – during the period in his life when he was renovating houses, he'd seen a lot worse. All things considered, this one wasn't holding up too badly, even if it was filled with snow.

Still, it stopped the wind chill, and that was the important thing. Reid, who seemed a little more together with things now that they had stopped, insisted on helping Morgan clear the snow while Emily tried to light a fire. It wouldn't have been such hard work if his hands weren't so numb. In spite of the potential frostbite, he kept this fact hidden from Reid and Prentiss; he would rather lose his own fingers than risk them losing theirs.

In any case, it wasn't as they could just call an ambulance.

It took a little over half a second for the realization to strike.

 _Shit_.

He ran to his pack, digging through the front pocket to find his phone. It would be a goddamn miracle if it still had any life left, but since they hadn't tried to order a pizza from the alternate universe, there was still the slightest chance…

One bar of battery.

And no reception.

'Fuck,' he muttered, tossing it back into the pack. They had a little bit of food, and they could melt snow for water, but Morgan knew that if they didn't get help soon, then they would probably die out here. There was always a chance that the weather would break, but judging by the amount of snow, he didn't think that would happen any time soon.

'So what?' Emily asked. She'd managed to get a small fire going, fueled by whatever tinder she could find. 'Just stay here until someone finds us? Do we have enough food to last that long?'

'When the Donner Party was stranded during an attempt to cross the Sierra Nevada, they resorted to cannibalism,' Reid provided, in a matter-of-fact voice.

There was a beat of silence.

'Well let's hope it doesn't come to that,' Emily said, with a raised eyebrow.

'Yeah,' Morgan agreed. 'With any luck, we'll die of hypothermia first.' He pulled out his mat and sleeping bag, rolling them out onto the cold, hard ground.

'The wood's wet,' Emily pointed out. 'It'll get going soon enough. Reid, do you want to take over while I help Morgan?' She didn't even bother pretending that her main motivation was to keep Reid as close to the fire as possible. Morgan was somewhat conflicted – Emily was shivering a hell of a lot worse than Reid, but she seemed determined that he make it through alive, and Morgan figured that those chances would increase if he worked with her, instead of against her.

'I know what you're doing,' Reid said suddenly, confirming Morgan's suspicions. 'You don't have to coddle me.'

'We're not coddling you,' Emily retorted. 'If the plan to kill the demons doesn't work, then you become the most important person in the world by default.' Morgan could tell that she had made the excuse up on the spot, but he wasn't going to argue.

As soon as they'd retreated to a safe distance, though, Emily said, 'Let me see your hand,' in the kind of voice that didn't allow for negotiation. He slipped the sock off of his left hand, and showed it to her. The skin had hardened, but not yet started to blister. If they were lucky, he'd probably have at least another day or so before it started to become a _real_ problem. At this stage, hypothermia was the more pressing problem.

'I guess we can hold off on getting a badass robot arm ordered for now,' she said, drily.

'Good to know. Now let me see yours.' Emily raised an eyebrow at his phrasing, but offered her hand for inspection anyway. It was in much the same state as his own, if a little more red thanks to the paleness of her skin.

Satisfied that neither of them would be losing fingers anytime soon, they put together a crude sleeping area from the contents of the packs. Close enough to the fire to be able to maintain it with little fuss, but far enough away that the sleeping bags wouldn't catch fire. Even with the fire, body heat would be just as important. It'd be a little stuffy, but with any luck, it would keep them alive long enough to be rescued.

After all, nobody knew where they were. Hell, _they_ didn't even know where they were. The probability of someone finding them by chance…well, Reid would probably be able to calculate those odds, but Morgan didn't really want to know the answer.

So they huddled together in their makeshift bivouac, and after a few tosses and turns, Morgan found himself sandwiched between his two companions in some kind of bizarre Gordian Knot configuration. Emily's head was pressed against Morgan's chest, and Reid had curled himself around his torso.

'Is Rossi gonna be jealous?' Morgan asked, grinning. His body was starting to feel sluggish, but he shrugged it off, attributing it to the exhausting events of the day.

'Bite me,' Emily grumbled in reply, without even looking up. There was a yawn in her voice, and Morgan wondered just how long it had been since they'd last slept. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to fall asleep in their situation, but he couldn't see any other options.

'Just be glad I didn't suggest a different way of keeping warm,' he said, jokingly. Apparently, Emily was already asleep, because there was no acerbic retort from either her or Reid.

Slowly, but surely, Morgan drifted off into darkness.

…

JJ searched the sanctuary from top to bottom. Surely Reid had left some kind of instruction manual somewhere.

 _It's Reid,_ she told herself, _any manual is probably locked away inside his head._

Even the writing on the wall had little order to it – Reid seemed to have written down whatever made sense to him at the time, which resulted in a nigh unintelligible scrawl of numbers, symbols and words.

She was pretty sure that the lever on the side was what started it, but knowing Reid, it could have just as easily been a built-in coffee maker. Since it was either go home or die, JJ was quite willing to take her chances. She ran a hand along the arch of the machine, and without any fanfare whatsoever, flipped the switch.

The machine buzzed.

The light it emitted was starkly different from the portal on the mountain; the way it rippled and shone reminded JJ of pearls. As cheesy as it sounded, it reminded her of _hope_.

It was a hell of a long time since JJ had _really_ hoped for anything, but now, she was hoping like hell that this portal would get her home. She wasn't sure what she even had left there, but it had to be more than what was on offer here.

With only the slightest of hesitations, she put her hand to surface of the portal. Without warning, tendrils of the substance curled around her, pulling her in. With a sound of surprise, JJ tried to pull away, but the tendrils snaked around her arms quickly and tightly, allowing no room for escape.

_Damnit, Reid. Why the hell didn't you say your machine would try to kill me?_

Maybe it wasn't a portal at all. Maybe it was just something to give her a swift, painless death. At this stage, JJ wasn't going to argue.

The sound of the buzzing changed to a lower, softer hum, and the portal began to vibrate. The world started to turn fuzzy; within seconds, it was vibrating so fast that JJ was sure that her body would be torn limb from limb.

But she wasn't.

The world dropped away completely, and a new one started to appear. It _wasn't_ a portal. It wasn't a death machine, either.

Before she had time to ruminate on the machine's purpose, the tendrils around her arms suddenly dropped, and she fell to the ground. Her stomach was roiling, and the new thought that was in her head was, _oh god I'm going to be sick._

But then she remembered what Reid had said: "It self-destructs after a single use," and JJ became aware that she needed to get the hell out of there, fast. Being involved in sport growing up suddenly seemed like the most important decision she'd ever made in her life. She was running, fast than she'd ever run before.

The explosion threw her forward, and she landed on concrete. Sore all over, it took every ounce of energy she had simply to get to her knees.

Concrete.

That was good.

It at least meant that she wasn't in the dark ages.

'You okay?' a voice asked. JJ didn't open her eyes, still afraid of what she might find. Voice sounded somewhat modern. Mid-western accent, with a hint of southern twang. 'I don't know what kind of demons were on your trail, but it looks like you got rid of 'em.'

 _Demons_ , he said.

Her heart started to race.

If there were demons, then…

'What year is it?' she demanded, feeling like a bitch for being so forward about it.

'2012,' he told her, and for a few moments, JJ couldn't breathe.

Forget the lottery. This was way more unlikely than that. This was one in a trillion trillions kind of odds. It had to be something more than that. Some kind of failsafe that Reid had put into place.

Less than a year in the past, maybe. Hell, it might have been a couple of months in the future. Not bad, all things considering.

And then it hit her.

_Oh my god._

'What month?' she asked, taking the hand that the man offered, as he pulled her to her feet. Her voice was shaking considerably, and that had nothing to do with the portal.

'April twelfth,' he told her, with raised eyebrows. 'You sure you're okay? That thing didn't give you amnesia or somethin'?'

'No,' JJ said. 'I'm good…I…'

_April 12th, 2012._

_Henry and Will were still alive._

_For another three days._

'Where am I?'

'Cocoa Beach,' he answered. JJ raised her eyebrows in surprised. Somehow, the sunny, tropical places always seemed like they'd have less demon activity.

JJ gave a small smile. 'All the worst cases are always in Florida.'

'Huh?'

She shook her head. 'Never mind. I need to get to Kansas as quickly as possible. Do you know anyone that's willing to take me there?' She patted her pockets, before remembering that her purse was in her backpack. 'I can pay.'

'I can take you,' the man offered. 'I go up that way every few weeks anyway. No better place to get 'wolf pelts. I'm Rick, by the way.' He held out his hand for her to shake, and JJ was starting to feel like someone had slipped a rabbit's foot into her bag, or something. There was no way in hell things should have been running this smoothly.

The realization took three and a half hours.

They were on the road to Kansas, Rick humming along to the Creedance Clearwater Revival tape that he'd slipped into the cassette player. JJ's head was leaning against the window, her eyes closed.

She'd been replaying the events from the alternate dimension in her head, over and over again. Wherever Reid, Morgan and Prentiss were going to show up, it'd be in the future somewhere. She'd have months to wait before she'd see them again.

Hotch, Rossi and Garcia, maybe a little less. If they weren't dead, that was.

 _As for the issues…well, let's just say I hope you like the possibility of dinosaurs. But you can't save them_.

He wasn't talking about Hotch, Rossi and Garcia.

He was talking about Henry and Will.

Now she understood what he meant when he was talking about paradoxes. If she saved them, then the future would change entirely. Maybe she'd never even go to the alternate dimension in the first place. Which meant that she'd never be able to come back in time to save them…

There was no telling what would happen. She might destroy the entire universe.

'Everything okay?' Rick asked. JJ didn't even bother to be surreptitious as she wiped a tear from her eye.

'Yeah. Just…some stuff.'

"Stuff" didn't even begin to describe the heaviness in her chest as she waited outside the Lawrence motel room two days later. Maybe she couldn't save them, but that didn't mean she couldn't _see_ them. It was a risky move, but in these circumstances, it was a risk that JJ was willing to take.

She kept her distance, lurking in the shadows as she waited for their arrival. It hadn't been their intention to come through Lawrence, but an incident a hundred or so miles south had them avoiding the road that they'd planned to take. The plan had been to meet Garcia and Kevin in Denver; the road was no place to raise a child.

They'd make it about halfway there, before a demon ambush took them off road. After burying their corpses…well, Denver was the _last_ place that JJ had wanted to be.

Just as the sun had started to set, she saw the car pulling into the motel parking lot. The woman driving was covered in blood; an incident with a vampire just outside of town had shaken them, but JJ was pretty quick with a stake.

It was bizarre, seeing the world like this; like she had an identical twin that had suddenly started living her life. It seemed like it would be so easy to simply walk in there, and warn them, 'Don't go to Denver tomorrow. Don't stop for the broken down car.'

But she didn't.

Twilight was quickly replaced by full darkness, and JJ counted down the minutes. She remembered the night far too vividly; some kind of a side effect of it being the night before the worst day of her life.

The chain on the door was broken.

Not unusual, considering the state of things. Motel rooms were being broken into all the time, and it usually took a while for the owners to get things fixed. It seemed nothing more than an inconvenience at the time, but now, JJ saw it as the greatest blessing in the world.

Will was a heavy sleeper.

In the months following Henry's birth, he'd somehow never managed to be awoken by any of the 2am screams. The end of the world might have made him a little more vigilant, but it still took damn near a thunderstorm to wake him.

She picked the lock quickly and quietly, feet soft against the carpeted floor of the room.

'Hey, baby,' JJ whispered, leaning down beside Henry's bed. This was risky as hell, but Will was asleep, and her past self would be in the shower for another twenty minutes at least; the vampire blood had worked itself into every nook and cranny.

'Mommy?' Henry asked, clearly confused.

'I'm just waiting for the water to heat up so it's not too cold,' JJ told him. 'I wanted to come and tell you how much I love you. Can you give me a kiss, buddy?'

Henry gave her a wet, sloppy kiss on the cheek, and then promptly fell back against the pillows, fast asleep. She wanted to hold him tightly, to never let go again, but that wasn't the way things worked.

In eighteen minutes, her past self would get out of the shower, and JJ would need to be gone from this place. In fourteen hours, the three of them would be ambushed by demons, and both Will and Henry would be dead.

There was absolutely nothing she could do to change that, and it just about killed her. So she pressed one last kiss to her son's forehead, wishing that she could give the same to Will. If he woke up, though, things would start getting a hell of a lot harder to explain.

So JJ slipped out the door, as quietly as she had entered. It wasn't the closure that she'd wanted, but it was the only closure that she could get. Now, she had a little under six months to wait out before her timeline caught up with itself.

Six months to get to Denver.

Six months to save her friends.

…

When Emily woke, it was still dark, with a hint of morning light starting to creep in through the windows. Her watch had not quite survived the trip across dimensions, so she couldn't tell exactly what the time was, but if she had to guess, she would have said it was somewhere between five and six a.m.

The fire had been reduced to mere embers, and Emily had started to feel the shivering set in once more. She adjusted her position so she could reach the pile of wood that they'd accumulated, feeding a few smaller pieces into the heart of the fire.

A wetness at her lips told her that her nose had started bleeding again, coupled with the incessant headache and bouts of dizziness suggested that whatever effect the portal was having on demons was messing with her mind, too. If it had anything to do with the fact that she'd been possessed in the past, then it was probably happening to Reid, too.

A quick glance back towards her companions soon made it very clear that Reid was not the one she needed to worry about.

Morgan had apparently shifted away from the fire during his sleep, and, just as importantly, away from the warmth of body heat and sleeping bags.

 _Fuck_.

'Reid, wake up,' Emily commanded, rushing to Morgan's side. She didn't even bother to check if Reid had heard her, her hand going straight to Morgan's neck. Pulse fast, his skin ice-cold. 'Morgan…Derek, can you hear me?'

Morgan stirred slightly. 'Whass going on?' His words were slurred, and the confusion was palpable.

'Mild hypothermia is often characterized by tachycardia and tachypnea, as well as excessive shivering and mental confusion,' Reid provided.

'Pulse is fast,' Emily confirmed. 'Can't quite tell about the breathing. Let's get him closer to the fire.' She bent down to hook her arms underneath his shoulders, ignoring the small waterfall of blood that seemed to gush from her nose as she did. 'There are some MREs in my pack,' she told him, as she pulled Morgan's head onto her lap, and made sure he had adequate coverage from the sleeping bag. If he was cognizant, she was sure he would have made some kind of remark about the positioning, but it was the best way to keep an eye on him while still taking advantage of the shared body heat. A hot meal would warm his insides up, which would help at staving off the progression of the hypothermia.

'One should be sufficient between us, if we want to conserve food,' Reid said, matter-of-factly, and Emily knew he was right. Even if she was starving, and even if Morgan did need the energy, they'd be dead within two days if they used up all their food now. After this one, they'd need to ration it even more.

Tucking himself under the other sleeping bag, Reid set about preparing what would pass for breakfast. 'Here,' he said, after folding the top of the MRE bag over while the meal started to heat. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and passed it over to her. Emily stared at it.

'After spending years in another dimension, you still carry a _handkerchief_?' Emily asked, incredulous. Still, she didn't turn down the offer. The blood soaked up quickly, but if it was anything like the nosebleeds she'd had in the past, it would probably start up again sometime soon.

'Force of habit,' he smiled, though it was a strained smile. In that moment, she could tell that she wasn't the only one who was having the headaches.

'How bad?'

'No worse than the migraines I used to get,' he said lightly, in the kind of voice that made it abundantly clear he was lying. 'Okay, this should be ready now.'

'Derek,' Emily whispered, rubbing a hand on Morgan's shoulder. He stirred again, however briefly. 'Hey, Morgan. I'm taking my shirt off.'

'What?' Morgan asked, suddenly far more awake than he had been. Emily suppressed a laugh.

'You need to eat,' she told him. 'Can you sit up for me?' He did so with some effort, frustrated with his own lack of responsiveness.

'I'm fine,' he insisted, words belied by the heavy shivering that had overtaken him, in spite of the sleeping bag.

'Can you please stop being the tough guy for a minute?' Emily's words were harsher than she'd intended, and came in the wake of another sharp pain in her head. Whiteness threatened to overcome her vision, but she clutched to consciousness, and after a few moments, it subsided.

More than anything else, they needed a hospital, but for now, breakfast would have to do. Reid portioned the meal out, and Emily didn't draw attention to the fact Morgan's share was easily the largest.

'I can feed myself,' he told her in voice that sounded annoyed, but drained. Since they only had one fork, Emily passed it over, knowing that even if he did have trouble feeding himself, they would still get some small amount of entertainment out of it. He managed surprisingly well, taking half a dozen mouthfuls before Emily decided that she was too freaking hungry to wait until the end of time for the fork, so she started eating with her hands. It was messy, but she didn't care.

Emily was halfway through her meal before she heard the sound of the helicopter. She dropped it without hesitation, and moved for her weapon, telling Reid and Morgan to stay where they were. In these circumstances, helicopter didn't necessarily mean "good guys."

The sound of ground vehicles became apparent as she moved towards the front door of the house. Then, a handbrake.

Whoever was out there was either looking for them specifically, or they were looking for shelter.

Making sure there was a bullet in the chamber, she opened the door, and stepped out into the snow. The blizzard had stopped, and save for the two SUVs parked by a copse of trees, there was an endless sea of white.

Pain burst into her mind, and her nose started dripping with blood once more. Her vision went blurry.

The dark figure that was walking towards her quickened its pace, and only then did Emily realize that her legs had given out underneath her. She clutched at her weapon, trying to lift it, but she didn't have the strength.

'Emily,' a voice whispered, in urgent tones, and in the back of her mind, she thought, _I know that voice._

She barely had breath enough left to reply, 'Rossi.'

…

No sooner than JJ had disappeared through the portal, it snapped shut, sending a wave of anguish through Hotch. He didn't have time to sit and ponder the matter; if he did, they were as good as dead.

Their attackers must have snuck up somehow. They'd all been so distracted by the prospect of traveling to another dimension that they hadn't considered who might want to _stop_ them from going there.

'Get down!' he yelled towards Garcia and Kevin, neither of whom were ready to get stuck in a demon fight.

Drawing his weapon, Hotch eyed his targets, no pun intended. Being half-blind meant that his aim and depth perception had both been compromised, but over the last few months, he'd tried to compensate. The first target went down quickly, two bullets to the chest. Six feet away, Rossi was grappling with another. Despite Hotch's orders to stay low, even Garcia and Kevin were doing their bit – double-teaming a demon that looked as though he was losing hopelessly.

Hotch almost smiled to himself. _It's always the ones you least expect_.

A rough hand at his neck threw him across the clearing, and he landed in the dirt with a thud. Before his mind had even processed what had happened, his hand was aiming towards the blurry shape that had thrown him.

The blurry shape collapsed, and Hotch frowned. He hadn't remembered pulling the trigger.

Aching, he pulled himself to his feet, anxious to see what other enemies were still out there. To his left, the trees were burning from the fires of the explosion. The sound of gunfire to his right told him that Rossi had dispatched the remaining attackers.

'Hotch, are you okay?'

'I'm fine, JJ,' he said, dismissing her concerns.

He frowned, his mind suddenly overcome with clarity. 'JJ? How did you—Are Morgan and Prentiss back as well?'

Her form became cleared as his vision returned, and he realized that she looked different. Older. Not much older, but enough for him to know that this was not the same JJ that had entered the portal just moments ago.

'Let's just say I came a _long_ way to get here,' JJ said, lips pursed. 'The portal is destroyed, but I don't know how long that'll take to come into effect on this side.'

Hotch frowned.

'Time dilation,' she explained. 'At least, that's what Reid thinks.'

'He's alive?' Hotch asked, voice filled with both surprise, and relief. Spencer Reid had disappeared under his watch. To know that the younger man was still alive knocked a heavy weight from his shoulders.

'Morgan and Emily are with him now,' JJ said. 'And I know that they'd sooner let themselves get eaten by rabid wolves than let any harm come to him.'

Hotch nodded. Though Reid had proven his strength time and time again, every member of the team felt some kind of protectiveness towards him.

'Wait, what's going on?' Garcia asked, having just entered the conversation. 'I thought you made it through the portal, JJ?'

'I did,' JJ said, grimacing slightly. 'For me, that was six months ago. When I returned to this dimension, it was April. I've been making sure I didn't run into myself.'

'Why would that be a problem?' Garcia asked, apparently unperturbed by the revelation that had friend had seemingly been the pioneer of time travel. 'That's twice as much ass-kicking power.'

'Because it didn't happen the first time,' JJ said. 'And the last thing I wanted to do was tear a hole in the universe.'

Apparently, Garcia agreed with that assessment, but it didn't change the fact that they had absolutely no idea what was going on. JJ seemed reluctant to tell them.

'It's not safe here,' she said. 'We need to get somewhere safe.'

'Back to Denver?' Kevin queried. JJ shook her head.

'We don't know where those attackers came from, or why they wanted to kill us. I've been making contacts over the last few months – if we move north, we can find somewhere a little safer.'

'Contacts?' Hotch queried.

'Well I was the communications liaison,' JJ said. 'And trust me, if we want the world to survive this war, then we are going to need a hell of a lot of communication.'

…

Emily blinked.

The world was white.

Was she still in the snow?

No. Too warm for that. White and warm and sterile. Hospital.

She struggled to sit up, and failed miserably.

'Hey,' Rossi said with a smile. 'Nice to see you're finally awake.'

'My head feels like a jigsaw puzzle,' Emily groaned. 'But it's nice to be in some place familiar. Like a hospital bed.' Her second attempt at sitting was far more successful, and she was rewarded with Rossi passing her a cup of water, which she drained almost immediately.

'We do seem to see a surprising amount of them,' he agreed.

'So where am I? And more importantly, _when_ am I?' If she wasn't going crazy, Rossi's face looked a hell of a lot more weathered than it had been when she last saw him.

'You're in Toronto,' he provided. 'Because for some reason you got sent back into the Canadian wilderness. It's mid-January.' There was a beat of silence. '2014.'

Emily started at him. ' _2014_ ,' she repeated, incredulous. 'We were gone more than a _year_?'

'Fifteen months,' he elaborated. 'But we haven't exactly been twiddling our thumbs.'

Emily shook her head. 'How the hell did you find us, then? The Canadian wilderness isn't exactly first on my list of places to look for missing friends.'

'A lot has changed in the time you've been gone,' he explained. 'Garcia had the resources at her disposal to get a computer network running again, and when the GPS showed your phones suddenly appearing in the middle of nowhere, we pulled out all the stops.'

A groan alerted Emily to the presence of the other bed. Morgan and Reid (asleep in a lazy-boy by Morgan's bed) were both stirring, as though they had sensed her arrival in the world of consciousness.

'Where are we?' Morgan asked. Emily told him, and he digested the news for a few seconds, before simply saying, 'Shit.'

Before Emily could even process his entering, Hotch was standing at the foot of her bed, and she realized that she had some news to deliver.

'Hotch…' Emily started. 'JJ…she…I'm sorry.'

To her surprise, Hotch smiled. 'You've been gone over a year, Prentiss. A lot's happened in that time.' Emily gave Morgan a look, the expression on his face about as confused as her own.

'If I knew I'd be taking the long road back, I would have let you stay behind,' came a familiar voice, and Emily turned so fast, she felt the reverberation of pain in her neck. JJ was standing in the doorway, alive and, quite frankly, looking a hell of a lot better than the rest of them.

'JJ?' Morgan asked, disbelieving. 'How the hell did you get back here?'

Only Reid seemed unsurprised regarding her return, because apparently, she'd used his interdimensional travelling machine to do it.

'You built an interdimensional travelling machine?' Emily asked, flatly. 'And you didn't think to even tell us about it?'

'I told JJ about it,' Reid protested.

'Actually, you told me it was a portal,' JJ corrected. 'Which kind of freaked me out when it suddenly grabbed me and started vibrating like a jackhammer.'

'I'm sure I said machine,' Reid frowned, eyes narrowing as though he was searching through his stores of meticulously collected memories in order to find out.

'I spent six months laying low in motel rooms plotting my revenge for that,' she warned him, but with such an edge of humor – and relief – that no-one seemed to take the threat seriously.

'Oh my God, why didn't anyone tell me they were awake!' a voice cried out, and not half a second elapsed before Emily was wrapped in a tight hug, most probably because her bed was the one closest to the door.

'Well we wanted them to recover a little bit before you got them all exhausted again,' Rossi said, without malice.

'Nonsense,' Garcia said, and moved over to Morgan's bed. It seemed that she'd already greeted Reid – a hug which probably lasted almost as long as his disappearance. It suddenly struck Emily that the team was back together for the first time in what seemed like an eternity. After everything that had happened, Emily had doubted that she'd ever live to see it. 'They are going to get lots of hugs, and they are going to _enjoy_ it.'

Hotch cleared his throat. 'There's another reason we knew that you'd come back,' he said, in a voice that seemed threaded with gravitas. 'We postulated that your return would coincide with the death of the demons – when Sekhmet started to die, it was a clear sign that the timelines were starting to realign. Ashley is…exhausted, but she'll be fine.'

'Sekhmet knew the consequences,' Reid told them. 'Even when she recruited me to destroy the portal, she knew that doing so would result in her death.' Emily tried to gather some kind of sympathy in her mind, but she couldn't. After everything that had happened, to her, a demon was a demon.

There was a long pause. 'So, everything linking to the alternate dimension has been destroyed,' Morgan said, though it sounded more like a question than a statement.

'Yes,' Reid confirmed. 'Now that the timelines have synched up, the demons should _all_ start to die off. Not just Sekhmet.'

'Which reminds me,' Emily said, giving Reid a light punch on the shoulder. 'You built a time machine. Tell me you hadn't been just _dreaming_ of doing that since you read H.G. Wells while still in diapers.'

'Actually, my first literary exposure to time travel was with Edward Page Mitchell's _The Clock that Went Backward_. Even then I knew that taking the Laws of Physics into account, such an advent was impossible. And technically, it was an interdimensional transportation device that travelled through time as a side effect.'

'And yet here we are,' Rossi mused. 'I guess our lives will start going back to normal now.'

Emily laughed. 'Our lives were _never_ normal.'

'Well at least serial killers are a little more predictable than demons,' he conceded, but there was a contemplative tone in his voice. Emily knew where he was coming from. Even if their lives did proceed as normal – which was unlikely – _they'd_ changed.

What would happen next?

Only time would tell.


	12. Chapter 12

Epilogue

_Six Months Later_

JJ had spent the morning cleaning up the office; somehow, the lack of proper regulations, and two years of living dirty meant that everyone else had forgotten how to. Rossi kept his office tidy enough, but when Morgan and Prentiss returned from their latest case, she'd be having words with them about proper recycling. They'd been in Seattle for two days helping clean out an infestation of vampires, and yet somehow there were still week-old coffee cups and soda cans sitting amongst piles of paperwork.

The Federal Bureau of Eradication was an informal name, but it was an accurate one; instead of tracking down serial killers, their expertise had turned to hunting down the last remnants of the apocalypse. The demons might have been dead, but their progeny didn't seem to have gotten the message; in their time in this dimension, they'd managed to turn or corrupt thousands of humans.

Of course, eradication wasn't the only goal; at its core, their mission statement was simple.

Putting the world back together.

Ultimately, it was a tougher goal than any of them had realized. Millions were dead, entire cities lay in ruins. Fire, and ash, and dust seemed the only things that would endure.

Perhaps one day – in a decade or so – things would be similar to what they had been before the end, but it would never truly be the same. There would always be the shadow of the past hanging over them. For some, more than others.

It was the first Wednesday of the month, which meant that all FBE section chiefs would be arriving for the requisite planning meeting. Firstly, it meant that the office would be overrun with agents from all over the country, but more importantly, it meant that she would be seeing Hotch.

Things had been complicated for the last year – time travel, demons and the end of the world aside, with each of them on opposite sides of the country, they hadn't exactly had much time together.

The sound of a vehicle pulling into the parking lot outside pulled her from her reverie. Black SUV, which didn't really narrow the options down. Her stomach roiled, when the driver's side door opened.

For half a second, it could have been like nothing had happened. He was wearing a dark, ironed suit, and his hair was impeccably brushed. The only indication that things had changed was the dark eyepatch, and lines of stress that marked his expression. The weight of the world was on his shoulders, but JJ was sure that it always had been.

Behind him, Reid slung his messenger bag over his shoulder. Of the team, he had probably changed the most. The time he'd spent in the alternate dimension had made him a lot quieter – a lot more pensive. His expertise in all things demon had been invaluable in ensuring that the rebuilding process went as smoothly as possible.

'Hotch,' she said, by way of greeting, as he pushed the glass door open. 'Reid.'

He paused. 'JJ.' Reid said nothing, instead staring off in the distance – it was a reaction that she'd come to expect; in half an hour, he'd be smiling and waving, and wondering why everyone else was already deep in discussion.

'Can we...' She gestured towards her office.

'Of course,' Hotch agreed.

Once inside she shut the door behind them, before closing the blinds. It was unlikely that Reid would care enough to even bother looking, but JJ preferred to be safe about it.

'I missed you,' Hotch said, which for him seemed like a declaration of undying love. He took her hand in his, and pressed a soft kiss to her lips.

'I missed you, too.' She let her thumb rub against his, relishing in the touch of his smooth but calloused skin. 'How are things running in D.C.?' Like all of the team, she kept up to date on reports, but the reports only told a small part of the story.

'They're...' He paused, as if considering his words carefully. 'They're progressing. The politics are tense, but they're stable. Nobody's claiming Rapture anymore, which is a relief.'

JJ nodded. The political and religious backlash hadn't quite been as intense for her, but that was to be expected. All things considered, there was still a long way to go.

Before she could ask him anything else (Like how Jack was doing, or if his eye was improving) there was a knock on the door.

'Sorry to interrupt the lovers' reunion,' Rossi said. 'But we need you both in the conference room.'

The meeting ran like clockwork – progress reports and future planning. There was nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary.

Just another day in a post-apocalyptic world.

Outside, JJ found Reid at the ocean. She hadn't had much of a chance to speak with him properly since his return; his mind was fragile enough that it never seemed to be the right time.

'It's a nice day for a swim,' he said, deadpan. Upon seeing her reaction, his face split into a grin. 'Of course, I wouldn't want to risk the possibility of vampire fish.'

'That's a possibility?' JJ asked, eyebrows raised. She'd been swimming at the beach on a weekly basis, only to find out that she could have been bitten by  _vampire fish_.

He shrugged slightly. 'They had them over there. I suspect it could have been how the mutation passed over to the mammals. Fortunately, there haven't yet been any reports of such creatures.'

'Good to know.'

She paused.

There had been time enough that she'd been going over the events of the past two years in her mind, trying to find some way of reconciling the past with what she knew of this brave, new world. Now that Reid was here, and vaguely cognizant, she could ask the question that had been burning through her brain.

'Can the demons see the future?'

Reid didn't answer straight away, and really, his silence was enough. Still, she pressed him.'The broken door chain, waking up three days before their death. I'm not stupid, Spence. How long did it take to get it right?'

'There were a lot of variables,' he admitted. 'I didn't have a hand in all of them, but...No matter how many changes I made, this was always the best case scenario,' he told her. 'The universe is far more fragile than you might think.'

JJ gave a bitter laugh. 'No, I can believe that it's pretty damn fragile. But still – thanks. Without you, I'd probably be dead.'

'Without you, I'd probably be insane,' he countered. A pause. 'More insane.'

A sudden beep sounded from her pocket.

Text message from Morgan.

'Everything okay?' Reid asked. Phone service wasn't cheap these days – even with text messages, it was best to save them for emergencies.

JJ stood, pocketing her phone. 'You want to come to Seattle?' She unholstered her weapon, checking the clip. Silver bullets.

'What did it say?' Reid asked, following suit.

JJ gave a small, but dark smile.

'"Bluejay."'


End file.
